Re: Request for Comment

Yaron --

I'll take the action to look at the DMA spec in comparison with our work
here.  However successful or unsuccessful DMA turns out to be, it provides a
useful map of the problem space we are trying to cover.  I think that Dennis
Hamilton, who has contributed largely to the DMA spec, is planning to attend
our November meeting, so he'll be able to help with any discussion of DMA in
relation to webdav.

On the subject of containment, section 7 of the spec proposes to use
SiteMaps as the new content type to represent containers.  I'd like to
change the name of the mime type to application/container to emphasize the
fact that it can represent something other than a URL hierarchy.  For the
case where it's a document management system that stands behind the Web
server, it may be desirable for the location parameter of a node in the
SiteMap to be expressible as something other than a URL.

I think it would be very useful to be able to do recursive deletes,
undeletes, and destroys on resources referenced by a container.  

At 09:29 PM 10/30/96 PST, Yaron Goland wrote:
>I wanted comment on these ideas before I did anything with them. Note that 
>the following contains very rough drafts.
>		Thanks,
>			Yaron
>
>
>I realize that DMA is about as popular as an Electro Magnetic Pulse but 
>someone (read: NOT ME) should really go through the DMA spec, 
>http://www.aiim.org/dma/spec75/index.html, and see how well we measure up.
>
>Currently there is no way to delete the contents of a directory. A 
>directory is really just a sitemap file which allows one to group various 
>unrelated URIs together. However if one were to want to delete all the URIs 
>in the directory one would have to send delete requests for each URI. The 
>logic extends if one wants to delete a directory and all its sub 
>directories. One of the reasons for this behavior is that many of the 
>common container commands, such as copy and move, have no meaning in this 
>context. If I have a container with URLs foo/bar and bar/foo then the only 
>way to copy them is to specify for each one where they are to go. If I 
>order "copy foo/bar and bar/foo to foobar" what does this mean? However 
>delete and undelete are different, they have a very obvious meaning in the 
>context of our containers. Should we add headers in the mime-type for 
>delete, undelete, and destroy to allow the command to be applied to the 
>contents of a directory in a possibly recursive manner?
>
>
>
Name:		Judith A. Slein
E-Mail:		slein@wrc.xerox.com
Phone:  	8*222-5169
Fax:		(716) 265-7133
MailStop:	128-29E

Received on Thursday, 31 October 1996 14:09:25 UTC