CompuServe Messages

Frank: You may be thinking about an effort started by SIGCAT a few years ago, and headed by a guy in the Air Force (his name will come to me). I think they were unable to come up with a protocol for the index itself, and became a group trying to implement a generic SGML description. In theory, a generic index structure isn't hard to conceive. One of the blocks these guys ran into, however, was the tendency of software companies to use proprietary compression/encryption schemes on their indices, and they are very protective of those schemes. As you might guess, there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm from the commercial marketplace. Best – Rich