My random thoughts,

• Why this functionality was never embedded into WFS i will never know. After playing with CSW for the last 6 months where similar “pagination” is available … it just makes sense. How the average Jo Blogs will ever understand what maxFeatures should be set to is irrelevant if the user cannot even determine how many *total* features are available given his query. OGC CS-W handles this quite nicely, almost identical to how Chris H. described it. If i search for “hydro”, it will give me a numberOfRecordsMatched=”340″ but then also tell me that i’m just viewing the first 10 records.

• Paging has been linked to server performance, particularly caching a set number of features. This imo, would only hold true if the given features are retrieved in the same manner. How this would handle filters i’m a little unsure of (beyond the simple bbox). Just because search engines index http://sigma.openplans.org/geoserver/water_shorelines/100 doesn’t mean that the same features will appear in the same page 10 days later, for example. Checksum? HTTP Last-modified? *shrug*

Looks like i need to pay more attention to the OGC boards

Related posts:

1. WFS-T adventures with Mapinfo 9.5
2. Taking it to “the man”
3. CarbonArc revisited