Re: Attributes in Prelim DAV Spec

I woke up this morning with a strong feeling that we're baking too
much into the URL syntax, and that while these kinds of decorations
are interesting and important for implementors of versioning servers,
there's no good reason why a client should be aware of them.

Suppose that a versioning-aware server just returns a LINK header, e.g.,
   GET http://www.cern.ch/TheBook/chapter2 HTTP/1.1
returns headers that include
   Link: <http://www.cern.ch/meta-repository/TheBook/chapter2>; rel="MetaData"

and then the client will know that it can do GETs against 
the linked URL to get and modify the attributes of the included
URL. 

This allows us to suggest a way of manging URLs in a particular server
implementation, but, at the expense of another roundtrip, lets the
clients be independent of the manging chosen, and gets us out of the
debate about how one URL should best be mangled to produce another
one.

As for dealing with a single metadata URL (Rather than an
attribute-at-a-time), I'd suggest that defining a media type
(text/metadata?) as 'external package for document metadata' and
return it all at once for retrieval, but have a separate set of
operations (POST or UPDATE) methods for actually changing individual
(or several) elements of the metadata.

Regards,

Larry

Received on Tuesday, 12 November 1996 11:53:02 UTC