- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 07:49:20 PDT
- To: slein@wrc.xerox.com
- CC: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> A different sort of goal I have for the Web is that it should be able to > provide a lot of the functionality that currently can only be provided using > commercial Document Management Services. For example, let's provide > containers directly on the Web, and then people won't have to buy Documentum > or PCDocs or anything else to get that functionality. Oh, well, I don't think that 'containers' are the reason that people buy document management systems. However, it would be very useful to standardize the web interface to containers. This isn't so different than the desire to standardize the web interface to 'directories', and from the web point of view, perhaps 'container' and 'directory' aren't so different? Many web servers offer a HTML view of a directory, and that (with some additional annotation) would be a good start for standardizing. Along the way, new media type(s) for containers (which could be Accept:-ed by clients that understand them) might also be useful. > For search, I think what needs to be in HTTP is a standard way of > communicating a query and a result set. Others will deal with such > issues as standard queryable attributes, standardizing search > engines, etc. But we also need to be aware of each other's work. I think this will be a separate activity from 'versioning and distributed authoring', but the coordination is important, e.g., to make sure that the query syntax is capable of querying for particular versions.
Received on Monday, 7 October 1996 10:49:43 UTC