Re: last calling WebDAV mounting spec, was I-D ACTION:draft-reschke-webdav-mount-01.txt

Cullen Jennings wrote:
> 
> This document looks grossly under specified. I don't even know what mounting
> means. It seems to lack many of the things you would need to make it useful
> for mounting and unmounting removable storage. I suspect I don't understand
> what the document is about. I would be very against the IETF publishing a
> document that someone in the WG could not understand what it did.
> 
> Cullen <not as chair>

Cullen,

when you say "it seems to lack many of the things you would need to make 
it useful for mounting and unmounting removable storage", could you 
please be a bit more specific?

WebDAV clients come in many flavors, such as

- filesystem drives (Xythos, Microsoft XP-Redirector, Unix/Linux fs 
drives such as the one in MacOSX)
- shell extensions (like Microsoft's Webfolder client)
- browser extensions (I think KDE#s webdav "URI" support falls into this 
category)

The aim of this document was to have a platform- and client-agnostic way 
for a server to let the client's system know that a specific WebDAV URL 
should be accessed, and that collection itself (or a descendant of it) 
should be displayed.

What may be looking like missing features was a deliberate decision to 
start with the simplest-possible format that solves the problem. That it 
*is* a problem IMHO shows that the market already has come up with a set 
of different approaches (see 
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-webdav-mount-latest.html#alternative.approaches>), 
none of which is portable.

Additional information for specific clients (such as a proposed "mount 
point" for Unix FS clients) can then be added by extending the XML 
format (potentially using a different namespace). But right now I'd 
really like to stick with the subset that is relevant for every client.

Best regards, Julian