Jim Croft writes:

Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 00:25:09 +1100 From: Jim Croft jrc@anbg.gov.au To: TDWG-SDD@usobi.org Subject: Re: XML gateways

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Virtually all major relational dbms now output XML, if crude, and there is not really much reason people shouldn't be doing so on some agreed upon alternative http port, say 8883.

I would advise against this... many institutional firewalls prohibit all packets except through port 80... this would effectively prevent all of our staff from playing with the outside world... bummer, but them's the rules...

Sad, but true. We should kick around other ideas to solve this problem, though a conventional port may be the easiest for data sources to implement. How about:

- A convention whereby if http://<host>/<filePath>/<cgiquery> yields HTML then http://<host>/<filePath>/xml/<cgiquery> yields XML

-A convention whereby people set up virtual hosts---pretty easy in most web servers---so that if http://<host>/<filePath>/<cgiquery> yields HTML then something like http://xml-<host>/<filePath>/<cgiquery> yields XML

Hopefully all of this is temporary, since a well crafted GBIF should provide for discovery of URL, query syntax, and return schema. My real point is that current versions of Oracle, SQL-Server, FileMaker, and Access(?) can already emit XML without much(?) effort on the part of the data source operators, and doing so would let people proceed to build interesting distributed applications.

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