Adding search constraints to collection listing

[Daniel Jalkut <jalkut@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

While thinking about some of the existing problems with the XMLRPC  
based MetaWeblog API, it occurred to me that it would benefit from a  
"search" mechanism. Its "getRecentPosts" interface requires that  
clients searching for posts of a specific nature fetch all billion- 
zillion posts and then do a client-side evaluation to find the ones  
they're interested in.

It got me thinking about how AtomPub basically suffers from the same  
problem, unless a server supports a means of winnowing down the  
results of a collection listing.

So my question to you all, is does it make sense for server  
implementors to support a predictable URL encoding for collection URLs  
that would imply a filtered response? Currently an AtomPub server may  
expose blog posts at a URL:

http://myblog.com/app/posts

Would a natural way to solve this problem be to support keyed search  
terms in the URL?

http://myblog.com/app/posts?status=draft&author=Daniel%20Jalkut

This would give clients and servers an easy way to expose only a  
subset of collection data, which would probably be a big win for  
bandwidth and speed.

It's also possible I'm stating the obvious. I just wanted to get this  
idea out here and hopefully it's not a repeat or redundant to some  
other discussion that's already occurred.

Daniel