if the
interface to it is some Web-only horror, I unfortunately will
not be participating
How else could it be done? Please be specific.
(1) Use email for sending data in, email and/or FTP for serving data.
(2) Set up an ssh/telnet-to-here-and-login-as-this-user CLI. (3) A
special-purpose mud, on which people could build representations of
their collections.
If you want a more precise design, I can try to come up with one for
you, though I'm somewhat limited in my desire to design things in
detail without at least a reasonable chance they might get built. I've
built enough software that I'm confident I could design and build any
of the above - or probably even all of the above talking to the same
backend database.
None of those precludes having a Web interface _as well_, of course.
It's the Web-_only_ things that are problematic. (I actually suspect
that being Web-only, per se, is only part of the problem, and that a
nontrivial part of the problem is the cultural baggage that so far, in
my experience, correlates amazingly well with building Web-only
interfaces, cultural baggage that assumes nobody ever wants to script
access to the interface, everyone is perfectly happy to use commercial
binary-only pointy-clicky software and in particular whichever
particular commercial binary-only pointy-clicky thing the designer
thinks is the One True Web Interface with all the security holes
enabled (Java, JavaScript, ActiveX, etc). It likely is possible to
build a decent Web interface - for my values of "decent" - to such a
thing, but I haven't seen it done yet.)
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