Re: Status of Bugzilla Bug 10, Round-tripping various information in properties

Wilfredo points out something I hadn't considered before, which I think 
addresses your concern, Geoff -- the idea that the only agents that 
need to preserve prefixes are those that want to.
  - Currently we have no known servers or clients that have a need to 
preserve prefixes.
  - If we had a server that decided to implement XPath-based search or 
something similar, that server could unilaterally begin to preserve 
prefixes as long as the standard doesn't prevent it.
  - If we had a client that decided to do something similar on its local 
cache/copy of data, the client would have to get a prefix-preserving 
parser and do a bunch of other work too -- but I don't see how the 
server behavior would entirely prevent this from working.

So although I'm OK with saying SHOULD preserve, I see good arguments 
for saying MAY preserve and I'm fine with that resolution too.

Lisa

On Dec 23, 2005, at 6:31 AM, Geoffrey M Clemm wrote:

>
> Wilfredo wrote on 12/22/2005 09:50:47 PM:
>  > > A property value serialized as #PCDATA (thus as escaped XML) is  
>  > > something else than a property value serialized as XML. If you  
>  > > control the format, such as when you define the property in a 
> spec,  
>  > > you sure have the freedom to say it's text, instead of XML. But  
>  > > this requires that senders and recipients agree on that. But in  
>  > > general, a client doesn't have that choice.
>  >
>  >    If you define the property, senders and receivers always have to 
>  
>  > agree to honor your definition.  That's not unique here.  To me  
>  > that's an argument for saying that such definitions SHOULD use 
> #PCDATA.
>
> I agree that if the property definer defines the property value as 
> being
> escaped XML text, then all clients that read that property will know 
> that
> they have to explicitly apply their XML parser to the property value
> (after the PROPFIND body has been parsed once by their WebDAV client 
> library),
> and that all clients that write that property will know that they have 
> to
> explicitly serialize their XML and wrap it with a #PCDATA wrapper).
>
> My point was just that this decision has to be made by the property
> definer, not by individual clients, so that all property readers
> and writers know that they have to explicitly do the parsing and
> unparsing, i.e. you can't have one client deciding it is going to
> escape the XML to preserve namespaces, and other clients not doing so.
>
> But also note that all you've really done is pushed the problem to the 
> client,
> because now each client has to be sure to use a prefix-preserving 
> parser
> when they parse the string, and use a prefix-preserving serializer
> when they serialize the XML for insertion in the #PCDATA.  
>
> Cheers,
> Geoff
>
>
>