Z39.58
And not a day after wistfully opining about the uses of a unified search-command syntax, I find out that there used to be one—ANSI Z39.58. I also find out that it’s been withdrawn and not replaced.
Well, that’s a bummer. Even if it didn’t appear to address things like truncation symbols and proximity operators. It was a step in the right direction.
What isn’t a bummer was that I could locate Walt’s fine discussion of what happened quickly and easily, which I couldn’t have done if he weren’t putting stuff up in HTML. Nifty.