RE: Attributes in Prelim DAV Spec

Is it just me or did he just reinvent LDAP?
	Which is pretty impressive in a letter less than 10,000 pages long. =)
		Yaron

>-----Original Message-----
>From:	Charlie Brooks [SMTP:cbrooks@osf.org]
>Sent:	Monday, November 11, 1996 1:10 PM
>To:	w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
>Subject:	Re: Attributes in Prelim DAV Spec 
>
>At 03:45 PM 11/11/96 -0400, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:
>>
>>
>>But I think there is somthing to it: if we adopt Charlie's
>>suggestion, then what about existing URLs with ; in them.
>>That is, suppose I've got a document I've been publishing
>>as:
>>	http://foo.org/docs;id=27
>>
>>for years, and now I want to add attribute functionality
>>to my service. What's the address of the 'author' address
>>of the doc above? Is it:
>>
>>	http://foo.org/docs;id=27;attribute=author
>>
>>I suppose that could work, but it make the server's job pretty hard:
>>the server might have to try lots of different ways of splitting the
>>URL between the attribute part and the base resouce part.
>>
>>Worse yet: what if somebody is already using the name:
>>
>>	http://foo.org/docs;attribute=XYZ
>>
>>for something else? Is that a problem?
>
>One ntion that might be applied here is that the server and client would
>negotiate the use of the WEBDAV protocol via the HTTP/1.2 Extension
>Protocol (PEP). The result of such a negotiation would be an agreement on
>certain "standardized" use of various elements of the URI (specifically,
>the "params" and the "query" portion). For example, the following URI would
>have specific meaning to a server using the WEBDAV protocol extension;
>
>	http://foo.org/docs/adoc;version=current?attribute=DC.author
>
>The server would interpret this as a request for the DC.author attribute of
>the current version of the document "adoc"; DC.author is meant to be used
>in the same sense as described in "A Proposed Convention for Embedding
>Metadata in HTML". One could imagine an HTTP link: header being returned
>that refers to the document describing these attributes. One might also
>imagine that servers might publish (negotiate) exactly which schema they
>were using, along with a URL indicating a machine-readable version of that
>schema. Finally, the server might then return a document of type
>application/attribute-listing, containing the (machine-readable) values for
>the attributes requested for that document.
>
>So, my basic point is that unless the WEBDAV protocol was in effect for
>this HTTP interaction, there would be no change to the interpretation of
>the URLs specified above. 
>
>--Charlie
>
>
>
>----------
>Charlie Brooks                           The OpenGroup Research Institute
>11 Cambridge Center, 4th Floor           Cambridge, MA 02142
>(617) 621 8758                           (617) 225 2943 (FAX)
>http://www.osf.org/~cbrooks              c.brooks@opengroup.org
>

Received on Monday, 11 November 1996 19:20:06 UTC