RE: Removing the DAV:activity and DAV:version-history and DAV:bas eline resource type values

   From: Stefan Eissing [mailto:stefan.eissing@greenbytes.de]

   > Von: Clemm, Geoff
   > This I believe remains the key argument.  Is future
   > interoperability improved, unaffected, or harmed through the
   > addition of these new resourcetype values?  My argument is the
   > "like a duck" argument (i.e. if it looks like a duck and acts
   > like a duck, even if it is some refinement of a duck, if your
   > client does not know about that "duck refinement", it is better
   > for your client to treat it as a duck than to treat it as an
   > "unknown resource").

   I think it's not only future interoperability, but also
   interoperability as such which can be improved by explicitly
   stating the type of a resource.  Rumour has it that code can have
   bugs.  Sticking to the analogies in this thread, if your
   mother-in-law does not report a property properly, the alligator
   might look like a duck and eat your client alive.

So the reason for adding values to DAV:resourcetype is that it is more
likely for a server to be able to return the correct DAV:resourcetype
value than it is for it to return the correct DAV:supported-method-set
or DAV:supported-live-property-set value?  I find that rather hard
to understand (much less, believe :-).

The reason I'm applying so much time/energy to this thread, is that it
is really a general DAV question that shows up (and will continue to
show up) in every DAV extension.  I'd like to develop some guiding
principle for "what goes in DAV:resourcetype", so that we don't end up
having these same (often metaphysical :-) arguments every time the
topic comes up.

For some historical background, I orginally proposed
DAV:supported-method-set and DAV:supported-live-property-set because
DAV:resourcetype wasn't giving me the detail I needed to populate my
GUI's.  Certainly, before I had these two properties, DAV:resourcetype
was essential.  This may therefore be one of those times where a
protocol feature that was required has become redundant through the
addition of later features.

Cheers,
Geoff

Received on Tuesday, 5 June 2001 10:42:57 UTC