RE: RFC2518 (WebDAV) / RFC2396 (URI) inconsistency

> > * WebDAV marshals "dav:" URIs that are the name of XML elements as a
> > {namespace} + {opaque_part} pair.  So, for example,
> "dav:creationdate" is <D:creationdate xmlns:D="dav:">.
>
> RFC2518 says *nothing* about URIs in the DAV: URI scheme. RFC2518 itself
> never says that an element name or a property "has" a URI.

Section 18 clearly states that "The property names and XML elements in this
specification are all derived from the base URI DAV: by adding a suffix to
this URI, for example, DAV:creationdate for the 'creationdate' property."

Now, we've had discussion on the WebDAV list to move away from this
position, and more towards the {namespace identifier} + {name} position
embedded within the XML namespace draft. This strikes me as a good thing.

> <D:creationdate xmlns:D="dav:"> must be read according to the specs that
> exist, and this means: an XML element with name "D:creationdate",
> local name "creationdate" and namespace name "dav:". BTW: this should have
> been "DAV:", right?

URI scheme names are case insensitive (see Section 3.1 of RFC 2396). So,
"DAV:" and "dav:" are equivalent.

> If you claim that any element or property in WebDAV has a URI,
> you'd have to answer:
>
> - do WebDAV element names and properties share the same namespace?

Yes.

> - what are the URIs (identifiers!!!) for: <cd xmlns="http://a/b/"
> /> and <d xmlns="http://a/b/c" />?

Following WebDAV concatenation rules:

<cd xmlns="http://a/b/" />  => http://a/b/cd

<d xmlns="http://a/b/c" />  => http://a/b/cd

Again, let me stress that this is what RFC 2518 says, and we have discussed
on the WebDAV list that this is probably not the best path to take going
into the future.


> It's shorter, but it's invalid (according to the XML NS rec), while the
> other one is perfectly valid.

OTOH, I haven't heard a compelling reason why the XML NS rec couldn't be
changed. Certainly this change would have far fewer interoperability
implications, especially since most namespace implementations already allow
just a URI scheme.

> OK, let's tell the W3C to use "xhtml:" instead of
> "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml".

I have no problem with this.

> *Lack* of interoperability with James Clark's code in JING exactly is the
> reason why we have this discussion. I think we should thank him
> for actually *using* the grammer in RFC2396 for validation, so this
> was finally uncovered.

Frankly, I have found this discussion to be incredibly moot, and of little
value.

- Jim

Received on Wednesday, 21 November 2001 13:06:50 UTC