Arnold,
Just a few comment about the output formats:
>Some comments:
>[...]
>Ad 5
>I think it is absolutely necessary to require at least three output
>formats: VOTable, HTML, and tab-delimited. It is silly not to allow
>HTML for queries that return very small tables, and tab-delimited is
>so universally useful that users will revolt if it's not available.
>And providing these three formats is no great burden for providers.
>
Some other persons could argue for FITS ascii, FITS binary, etc... The great advantage of the XML is that all data/metadata are there -- XSLT engines to convert from VOTable/XML to HTML and tab-delimited should do the job (and I've seen quite smart transformations from VOTable to HTML with XSLT). Mark Taylor and our Indian colleagues could also say a lot about the conversions between the various tabular formats ! The only dilemna I see is whether such transformations should be done at the server's or client's side -- pros and cons bor both.
--francois
Francois Ochsenbein ------ Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg 11, rue de l'Universite F-67000 STRASBOURG Phone: +33-(0)390 24 24 29 Email: francois-at-astro.u-strasbg.fr (France) Fax: +33-(0)390 24 24 32 ================================================================================Received on 2007-05-17Z11:49:49