Bugzilla issue 10, was: Plan to resolve issues in 2518bis

Cullen Jennings wrote:
> ...
> Julian is going to start a thread on one hard issue some time soon.
> ...


OK, here we go. I'd like to discuss the following issue...:

<http://ietf.cse.ucsc.edu:8080/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10>

which reads..:

-- start --

4.5: “The value of a property appears inside the property name element.
    The value may be any text, including valid XML.  When the value is
structured as XML, namespaces that are in scope for that part of the
XML document apply within the property value as well, and MUST be
preserved in server storage for retransmission later. Namespace prefixes
need not be preserved due to the rules of prefix declaration in XML.”

1) I think this needs to rephrased to use proper XML terminology, also
2) I think that namespace prefixes within the property value do need to
be roundtripped.

Proposal:

“The value of a property appears inside the property name element and
may be any kind of well-formed XML content, including both text-only and
mixed content. When the property value contains further XML elements,
namespaces and namespace prefixes that are in scope for that part of the
XML document apply within the property value as well, and MUST be
preserved in server storage for retransmission later.”

Update draft -05/06:

Issue 2 still needs to be resolved, the current text says: "Namespace
prefixes need not be preserved due to the rules of prefix declaration in
XML. This is incorrect because namespace prefixes *are* significant for
certain XML vocabularies, such as XSLT and XML Schema. So independantly
of what we decide for WebDAV, we should add an accurate statement about
what that means for arbitrary XML content in properties.


(Now in 4.4
(<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-webdav-rfc2518bis-07.html#rfc.section.4.4.p.5>))

-- end --

Proposed solutions:

(i) stick with the stated behaviour, but fix the explanation that 
misleadingly states that namespace prefixes are irrelevant,

or

(ii) state that namespace prefixes need to be preserved (such as in the 
text proposed by myself).

Further thought: depending on what standards status we aim for, we 
either need to think about what the protocol *should* be doing, or what 
current implementations actually do today. As far as I can tell, IIS 
doesn't preserve mixed content at all, while Apache/mod_dav does that 
(however it doesn't preserve prefixes; but maybe this can easily be 
fixed). I know that SAP Netweaver is preserving prefixes, and I 
*suspect* that Xythos does this as well (to be tested).

Feedback appreciated,

Julian

Received on Wednesday, 5 October 2005 18:42:38 UTC