RE: Clarification of URI vs. resource

> There is no requirement that DAV enabled resources be in a DAV collection.
> Section 5.1 of 09 specifically states that DAV does not require the
> namespace to be consistent. Thus you can have DAV resources which do not
> necessarily have a DAV parent. The only rule is that if you do have a DAV
> resource and if it does have a parent (a term defined in spec) and that
> parent is DAV compliant then that parent MUST be a collection.
>

Right.  But this is exactly the behavior that Roy was concerned with.  Do
you think WebDAV needs to require this constraint?

- Jim

>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roy T. Fielding [mailto:fielding@kiwi.ics.uci.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, November 12, 1998 2:54 PM
> To: ejw@ics.uci.edu
> Cc: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Clarification of URI vs. resource
>
>
> >Roy Fielding agreed:
> >> I'll agree with Larry here -- I've been staying out of the debate
> >> largely because I don't understand the need for the requirement at all.
> >
> >The only problem is that I don't understand what constraint
> they're talking
> >about! Is this a discussion of case sensitivity, or namespace
> consistency?
>
> My comment was regarding the requirement that DAV capable resources be
> within a DAV collection.  There is no need for that requirement and it
> is the root of many terminology issues.  Any individual resource is
> capable of being or not being DAVable, as determined by either the
> capabilities described by an OPTIONS response or by the error response
> received when attempting to do a WebDAV operation on a non-DAV resource.
> "Save as..." dialogs are cool, but not necessary, for authoring.
>
> Eliminating the unnecessary requirement also removes any need to talk
> about how many different URI reference the same resource, or what
> might be the canonical preferred URI for a given resource.  It just
> doesn't matter if the definition is based on the request semantics
> instead of a paricular idealized model of the URI namespace.
> Instead, just define what a collection contains (its own namespace)
> and how to get a representation of that collection.
>
> This was also the meat of the primary (aside from locking) objection
> raised in Mark Anderson's critique of section 5 within
> <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/1998OctDec/0099.html>.
> In fact, I'd recommend replacing much of the existing section 5 with
> the text he articulated, or at least merge it in so that it is clear
> what motivates the discussion and explain why the "source resource"
> reference is actually the most significant bit that DAV adds to HTTP.
> Because it is, and I'm getting a tired of explaining what a server is
> supposed to do when a client tries to PUT to a derived resource.
>
> ....Roy
>

Received on Thursday, 12 November 1998 20:39:26 UTC