RE: Attributes in Prelim DAV Spec

This group must define a fairly robust set of attributes. Else everyone
will invent their own and it will take forever before things sort
themselves out. A mechanism to set attributes is just that, a means. I
am much more interested in the ends. For that, we need to define the
attributes we defined the mechanism for.

MIME types are nothing more than data formats. There is nothing mystical
about them. We have a need for well defined data formats so we decided
to use the MIME mechanism.

			Yaron

>-----Original Message-----
>From:	Larry Masinter [SMTP:masinter@parc.xerox.com]
>Sent:	Thursday, October 31, 1996 9:30 PM
>To:	slein@wrc.xerox.com
>Cc:	Yaron Goland; w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
>Subject:	Re: Attributes in Prelim DAV Spec
>
># When you register an attribute, you have to register with it a mime type
>(or
># specify an existing mime type that it uses).  The mime type would specify
># things like whether the value can be a list or must be single-valued, the
># set of valid values or range, length constraints, etc.
>
>I think 'mime type' is not the right type space for attribute
>values. Internet Media Types aren't a general typing mechanism, and
>the kinds of things you want to say about attributes don't really fit
>in, except in the cases where the attribute value really _is_ a piece
>of media.
>
>Since there's such a strong interaction between metadata and search,
>perhaps we shouldn't try to specify too much in the 'versioning and
>distributed authoring' domain except for the mechanisms by which
>attributes get set.
>
>Larry
>
>
>

Received on Friday, 1 November 1996 02:48:05 UTC