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In the spirit of wouldn't-it-be-nice, I'll put out a request for a better idea. I think we are missing the boat a bit with respect to the metadata tag, but I am not sure of the solution. Consider GCMD, for example. You have included DIF as one of the metadata types, but from a client point-of-view, that is much less than what can be done. Consider for example, HELLERMAN, which is a GCMDID. With that id, I can ask the GCMD for many versions of the metadata, including I suppose the DIF document itsself (though offhand I do not know how to construct the URL to get the DIF). Sample url (html): http://gcmd.nasa.gov/servlets/md/getdif.py?entry_id=HELLERMAN&xsl=full_display.xsl&portal=gcmd Obviously if I am writing an HTML client, the html version would be nice. If I am editing DIFs, I probably want the DIF version, etc. So are these different metadata? Or are they metadata-services on the same metadata, i.e. I can get it translated by various servers? Benno