Future direction for DASL/WebDAV SEARCH

All,

I'm interested in people's thoughts on how to proceed with the DASL
specification.

The DASL protocol, in its current form, has a great deal of effort and
maturity. Its well-specified enough such that there are multiple
interoperating implementations. Though it has limitations, it is very useful
in its current form. This argues for issuing the current specification as an
RFC, either standards track or experimental.

On the other hand, there are many features that would be nice to have added.
Some imply significant changes, as with proper sort ordering and comparator
evaluation of dead properties which implies adding a type system to WebDAV
properties. As well, handling XML querying intelligently would be a plus,
but would also require much work. This argues for creating a new working
group to address further development of DASL. It might make sense to involve
a wider audience, perhaps by including people in the W3C community
interested in protocols for XML searching.

So, there are a couple of choices:

a) Do we issue current specification more-or-less as-is?
   i) as Proposed
   ii) as Experimental
b) Do we continue development of the specification?
   i) within WebDAV community only
     - as new WG? in DAV WG?
   ii) expand community to address Web/XML searching in general, not
necessarily focused on WebdAV
     - as IETF WG? as W3C activity?

There are probably other choices as well.

Let me know what your thoughts are.

Thanks!

- Jim

Received on Monday, 29 September 2003 17:00:27 UTC