Re: Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web--Missing His Main Point

From: Till Kinstler <kinstler_at_nyob>
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:48:26 +0100
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Karen Coyle schrieb:

> I don't recall the details, but something in the back of my mind is 
> telling me that the sessions exist because we didn't want vendors to use 
> cookies on public access terminals. 

To link to a single record, you don't need any session handling (so you 
don't need any cookies or session parameters). HTTP is so powerful 
because it is stateless...
All this session fuss in OPAC products is because legacy library systems 
and their OPACs (or at least there concepts) are coming from an age when 
HTTP wasn't well understood (if it was already there...). And looking at 
some "new" products put on the market recently, I doubt some have done 
anything to improve their understanding of the web...

Look at VuFind or Blacklight (that are using a stateless search server 
(Solr) in the back): You don't need any session handling to search and 
display records on the web...

Till

-- 
Till Kinstler
Verbundzentrale des Gemeinsamen Bibliotheksverbundes (VZG)
Platz der Göttinger Sieben 1, D 37073 Göttingen
kinstler@gbv.de, +49 (0) 551 39-13431, http://www.gbv.de
Received on Mon Oct 26 2009 - 03:49:55 EDT