What I am thinking of is a more general and far more versatile and powerful concept. It involves specifically requesting information using the Web address or special data entry Web pages.

This is their present search address. They could use this one as a base or any other address.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/search/

What people would then do is add code to that address. And the USGS CGI program that processed the code would respond according to those instructions.

For example, the following could be added to that address:

F:ASCII,

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/search/F:ASCII

That would mean that the program should return the data as ASCII text. If nothing else were added to the line the data would all be separated by a single space. If no date and ranges were specified it would return things such as date, time, latitude, longitude, depth, magnitude, and Country Name for all earthquakes that occurred on the present day using UTC times.

2013/09/08 12:34:56 45.34 –116.456 34 3.3 United States
2013/09/08 08:23:45 45.12 –115.456 34 2.3 United States
2013/09/08 04:34:56 -12.34 –75.123 50 6.2 Peru
(not real earthquakes)

F:-*ASCII,

That would mean that the program should return the data as ASCII text without any spaces between the data.

F:CVS,

The program would return the data as Comma Separated Strings.

F:Col,

It would return all data in columns. If nothing else were specified they would be the minimum size for a particular type of data. For example, if longitude followed latitude then there would be enough spaces between them so that the longitude number could be –123.456 or –12.345 or –1.234 or 1.234. And the –123.456 would have a single space in front of it. And the decimal point for that one and any others would always be at the same location in the column.

UTC,

All times returned would be UTC. If no time format were specified, UTC would be the default.

LT:+5,

All times returned would be local. So it would add 7 hours to the UTC time. LT:-7 would have it subtract 7 hours from the UTC time. That would make it U.S. West Coast time I believe.

Date,

It would return as 2013/09/08. If no Date format were specified, that would be the default.

Date:mm-dd-yyyy,

That would return as 09-08-2013.

Or the site visitor could request that it be returned as 2013-09-08 or 09-08-2013 or any format desired.

Lon,

It would return as –123.456

Lon:R+-###.##,

Would return rounded off to the second decimal place as –123.46 with extra spaces added for longitudes less thatn +- 100

Lon:NSEW#.#,

Would return as 23.5W with no extra spaces for longitudes higher than +-9. And it would not be rounded off.

*,

A signal space would be added.

”’”,

‘ would be added.

“&”,

& would be added.

‘”’,

“ would be added.

TR:-3-Present,

The time range for the search would be from the present time to three days back in time.

TR:2013/08/01-Present,

The time range for the search would be from August 1, 2013 to September 8, 2013 (present date).

Country-Name,

The full name of the country or area where the earthquake occurred.

Country-Name-3

The 3 letter code for the country.

So, what you would do is decide on how you wanted your data returned. And the line you would then enter into your browser would then look like this:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/search/F:ASCII,TR:-3-Present,Date,Time,Lat,Lon,Depth,Mag,Country-Name,Country-Name3

The data would be returned as:

2013/09/08 12:34:56 45.34 –115.456 34 5.3 United States USA
2013/09/07 01:23:45 46.34 –116.456 34 5.3 United States USA
2013/09/05 12:34:56 -12.34 –75.123 50 6.2 Peru PER
(not real earthquakes)

This approach would make it possible to add all different types of data to the table that was returned. For example, the latitudes and longitudes of the sublunar and subsolar points and the distances from the fault zone or the center of the Earth to the sun and to the moon could be added to the data lines for the time the earthquake occurred, and on and on.

There could be hundreds of possible variables to add to the lines. There could also be a data entry box similar to the EarthWaves where the data line format could be specified. Then a long address line would not need to be used. And there could be “Do it yourself” HTML Web pages that the site visitors could prepare and use to submit requests automatically.

It would be extremely easy for USGS programmers to do all of this. The formats would be permanent. And they could still create new versions of their regular Web pages like they are doing at the moment.

These are personal opinions.