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