Datalink - a naive question...

[Laurent MICHEL]

Hello,

Datalink can either be simple resource within a VOTable as you said or 
it can be a standalone service acceded in any context you could imagine.
In both cases, the client must be able to get the 
availability/capabilities and others DALI/VOSI features.

Regards
LM

Le 14/03/2014 10:47, Paul Harrison a écrit :
> Hi DALWG,
>
> I have a naive question - why is DataLink defined as a service rather than simply a specialised VOTable pattern with an associated mime type?
>
> It seems to me that documentation could be greatly simplified if this approach were taken - no DALI, VOSI etc. in the Datalink document.
>
> Then just modify DALI to say that services that return URLs to data might point directly to a data file or to a DataLink VOTable with the two cases determinable by the client using the mime type.
>
> Overall this seems to reduce the overall complexity of the documentation with no loss of functionality, or am I missing something?
>
> Regards,
> 	Paul
>

-- 
---- Laurent MICHEL              Tel  (33 0) 3 68 85 24 37
      Observatoire de Strasbourg  Fax  (33 0) 3 68 85 24 32
      11 Rue de l'Universite      Mail laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr
      67000 Strasbourg (France)   Web  http://astro.u-strasbg.fr/~michel
---