WEBDAV WG Meeting summary

Here is my 1-2 paragraph summary of the WEBDAV Working Group meeting held 
at the Munich IETF.

The WEBDAV Working Group met at the Munich IETF on Monday, August 11, 1997, 
from 13:00 to 15:00.  There were 54 attendees throughout the duration of 
the meeting.  The meeting was chaired by Jim Whitehead, and notes were 
recorded by Del Jensen.  The meeting began with a short overview 
presentation on WebDAV, which was followed by a presentation giving an 
overview of the design of the properties and collections functionality in 
the WebDAV protocol specification.  After this presentation, the remainder 
of the meeting was concerned with discussing a series of open issues.

During the issues discussion, the attendees were in favor of the following 
recommendations:
- The DAV property identifiers (i.e., ";DAV/" + property URL), discussed in 
Section 2.4 of draft-ietf-webdav-requirements-01.txt, should not be used, 
and should be removed from the spec.
- The SEARCH method (Section 2.6.5) should be renamed to PROPGET (or 
GETPROP or FINDPROP), and should be limited to retrieving just named 
resources from a given resource.  There should be an additional mechanism 
for retrieving the names of all properties on a given resource without 
having to retrieve their values as well.
- The property attributes "live" and "readonly" (Section 2.3.1, 2.3.2) 
should not be returned with each property instance retrieval, but should 
instead be retrievable via a schema discovery mechanism (TBD) which would 
state the extent (i.e., which namespace) and attributes (live, readonly) of 
a property.
- The Depth header (and hence recursive semantics for method invocations) 
should be moved to a separate specification, which will proceed separately 
from draft-ietf-webdav-protocol.  There was a suggestion to not use a Depth 
header, but to instead define separate functions (e.g., DEEPCOPY) for the 
recursive analog to existing methods.
- Atomic locking of collections (Section 5.3.1.2 of draft-ietf-webdav-re  
quirements-01.txt) was discussed, and it was agreed that the requirement 
should stay as-is, that efforts should be made to satisfy this requirement 
in the protocol specification, but that there should be an awareness that 
this requirement might not be satisfied.
- Authoring support for language variants was discussed, and no firm 
resolution was achieved.

- Jim Whitehead <ejw@ics.uci.edu>

Received on Thursday, 14 August 1997 05:04:42 UTC