Re: [dix] on the dix: URI scheme for DIX/SXIP

Ben Laurie wrote:
>  ...
>>> let's not do the DAV: thing again.
>>>
>>> Instead of
>>>   dix:/homesite
>>> just use something like
>>>   http://dixs.org/terms#homesite
>> Thanks for the input Dan. Sorry you won't make Dallas. I'm not familiar
>> with what happened with DAV: -- is there somewhere you can point for
>> enlightenment?
> 
> Hmmm. Not sure what happened, but the outcome was that DAV uses the HTTP
> namespace and adds extra headers and methods to the requests.
> ...

For the record:

- WebDAV (RFC2518) defines (well, registers...) the "DAV" URI scheme, 
and RFC2518bis will continue to do so.

- WebDAV resources are HTTP resources, and thus are addressed using the 
HTTP/S URI scheme. There is a hack in KIO (the KDE IO library) that uses 
an URI scheme called "WEBDAV", but that's not per the standard (and IMHO 
an ugly hack just like ICAL and ITMS).

- WebDAV *does* use the "DAV" URI scheme for minting identifiers, mainly 
used in request/response bodies (marshalling, property names, condition 
codes). Use of the "DAV" URI scheme is reserved for use by specs 
published by the IETF. And yes, that was an extremely bad idea in the 
first place (*), the working group should just have used an HTTP URI.

Hope this clarifies the situation,

Julian


(*) In particular because RFC2518 uses the string "DAV:" where an URI is 
needed, but RFC2396 said that URIs must have a non-empty scheme-specific 
part. This has changed in RFC3986 because of "DAV:" and similar abuses 
(such as "about:").

Received on Thursday, 20 April 2006 09:04:46 UTC