Thread: lots o' comments

Hi

Is this the expected way for the station comments to be used? I guess these
technically are legitamate "station comments", but I worry a bit about the
large increase in verbosity, especially when getting things at the
"station" level. There are 1744 lines in the xml, of which all but 25 are
"comments". Generally clients asking at this level are doing simple things
like plotting on a map or discovering that stations exist. These comments
seem more along the lines of "show me known data problems at this station"
which might be better as a separate service. I don't know if this station
is particularly prone to lots of comments, but if all stations were this
verbose it would be a significant bandwidth issue.

Also, because of the way the xml schema is structured, all of the comments
must come first, which the more traditionally useful stuff, like lat and
lon, are all the way at the bottom. Other than memory usage, that is less
of a problem for automated clients, but can be for a person looking at it.

http://service.iris.edu/fdsnws/station/1/query?network=II&station=AAK&level=station&nodata=404

thanks
Philip