nerds, geeks, and assorted weirdos:
if you were building a smol, simple, self-hosted multimedia web hosting site and wanted to make it easy for integration as a source for other web apps (for embedding, linking, etc) how would you choose to expose the hosted files to other apps? webdav?
Lady, EVOLVED 
@djsundog i think there is an assumption that any large collection will require some searching to navigate, and search is often a bit fine-tuned, so there hasn't been a ton of work to standardize navigating and exploring collections across platforms
but assuming you have found a resource and have a link to it, there has been a lot of work into how you can then reuse that resource in lots of places
@djsundog https://www.openarchives.org/pmh/ is very old but still pretty widely used i think for querying the contents of collections; might be somewhere to look for that piece
@Lady this deffo looks interesting - thank!