RFC for DALI-1.0

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear DAL folks,

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 10:28:04AM -0800, Patrick Dowler wrote:
> The IVOA DAL Working Group announces the start of the Request for
> Comments period for the Data ACcess Layer Intergace (DALI) 1.0
> standard.
[...]
> The RFC will run from 2013-02-21 to 2013-03-21. Comments should be
> made on the RFC page:
> 
> http://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/DALI1RFC

To get the ball rolling, let me mention here I've added a bunch of
comments on that RFC page.  It looks worse than it is, much is fairly
minor.  Probably the most contentious thing is that I'm not a big fan
of turning the /examples markup into something that would mark up,
basically, standards, rather than examples for their usage.  Hm.

A second major point would be that from the current document I'm
still not sure whether I'm supposed to return my VOTable error
documents with a 200 or a 400/500/some other error code.  I believe
the Sao Paulo agreement was current DAL behaviour (returning 200 if
you can even if the server's on fire) would be legal and might be
mandatory); I won't veto that, but I'd like to repeat my strong
dislike for this kind of weirdness ("everything's ok, but here's an
error message for you...").

Cheers,

            Markus