RE: comment on issues in DASL draft: query on href

Lisa Dusseault proposed a use case and gave several examples.  I think I 
could summarize her use case as the observation that it is often the case 
that the URL (the href) of a resource is meaningful and hence useful to 
search.  It's true that the href might not be meaningful in all cases, but 
it is certainly meaningful in at least some cases, and enough to be worth 
consideration.

I think she's right.

But first let's clear up a confusion about the displayname property.  RFC 
2518 defines the displayname property (13.2) as "a description of the 
resource that is suitable for presentation to a user".  The examples make 
clear that this is intended to be a plain text description, not a copy of 
the href, so a typical display name might be "How to wreck the california 
energy economy" as opposed to "http://enron.com/~lay/fatboy666.xls".  RFC 
2518 makes no promises that you'll find anything related to a "filename" in 
the displayname.

This does not affect the validity of Lisa's use case in the 
slightest.  it's useful to be able to search display name, and, in some 
cases, it would also be useful to search the href, if only this were possible.

Luckily, I think it is not only possible, but easy.  While it is true 
that  RFC 2518 does not define an href property, DASL is not restricted to 
searching only those properties defined by RFC 2518.   In theory, any 
property could be searched.  So if a DASL search arbiter wants to support 
search on a property whose name is DAV:href, there is no obstacle.

How do can a client know whether a DASL search arbiter supports this 
property?  Either it uses QSD, or it just assumes it does.  Either way is 
fine with me.

In summary, we can support this use case, and no protocol changes are needed.

Received on Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:24:16 UTC