- From: Jim Whitehead <ejw@ics.uci.edu>
- Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1997 11:13:21 -0800
- To: w3c-dist-auth@www10.w3.org
- Cc: Richard Taylor <taylor@ics.uci.edu>, ejw@ics.uci.edu
I finally have enough time to report on the activities of the WEBDAV group over the month of December. Here is my first pass at minutes from the IETF meeting. Please send comments/corrections on these minutes to Jim Whitehead <ejw@ics.uci.edu>. - Jim ---------------- WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WEBDAV) BOF Meeting Minutes San Jose IETF Meeting December 11, 1996, Reported by Jim Whitehead (U.C. Irvine) Jim Whitehead, U.C. Irvine chaired the meeting. The BOF on WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WEBDAV) was held on Wednesday, December 11, 1996, from 09:00-11:30, with 79 people in attendance over the duration of the meeting. Jim Whitehead presented an overview and history of WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning, including information on how to become involved in the work of the DAV group, which was followed by a detailed presentation on the current Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV) functional requirements. During the presentation of the DAV functional requirements there was lively discussion on many points: LOCKS. Meeting participants expressed the opinion that remote lock administration functionality is needed. At present, there seems to be an assumption that the webmaster will perform this lock administration role, which could become onerous if there are many active locks. There was some discussion on whether lock timeouts would help address the lock administration problem. Several comments addressed the need for some authentication technology to be used to identify and validate the user or agent operating on a lock. Existing HTTP authentication schemes (basic, MD5) were discussed in this context, and there was a suggestion that public key technology should be investigated for this use. There were some questions concerning what error codes and conditions might result from locking activities. Several participants stated that it would be helpful to have a model of access control which matches the locking model. It was observed that the proposed "read lock" was really a convenience access control function to modify the read permissions on a resource, and that a read lock might not really be a lock. MOVE. There was a thread of discussion concerning how intelligent an operation "move" should be. Some participants felt that HTTP should recognize the special nature of HTML media types, and automatically perform some link maintenance on links which are broken by a move. This intelligent move operation was referred to as a "magic move." Three link cases were identified: 1) links to a resource, 2) links from a resource, and 3) links within a resource. While it is impossible to correct all links pointing to a resource (since in general you do not know or have control over all of the links pointing to you), it is conceivable that links from a resource, and links within a resource might be corrected. Also, it might be possible to correct all links in documents that you do have control over (such as the documents on a single server). However, some participants expressed serious concerns over allowing a move operation to have side-effects which could modify the resource being moved, or even modify resources which were not being moved. These participants stated that what was most important was being able to know exactly what the consequences of an operation would be before executing the operation. As a result, each DAV operation must have precisely defined semantics. Finally, it was noted that this discussion had some similarity to the symbol table and link table issues which occur in compiler/linker development. MISCELLANEOUS. There was a recommendation that the DAV protocol be supportive of links to a discussion forum, so that remotely authored documents could be embedded in an issue discussion space, or a rationale space. One participant recommended that even if the DAV group is not planning on developing DAV-specific authentication or security technologies, that we should still develop requirements by which authentication or security technologies can be assessed for their usefulness to DAV activity. It would also be helpful to develop the hooks necessary to use some existing authentication and security technologies. There were recommendations of related protocols and systems to investigate: Andrew File System (AFS), Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), and Application Configuration Access Protocol (ACAP) were recommended to be examined for their models of access control. FORM WORKING GROUP. At the end of the session, the attendees were polled on whether they thought it would be worthwhile for the IETF to work on WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning. Overwhelmingly, the attendees thought the IETF should pursue work in this area (the vast majority were in favor, with 2-3 opposed, and a handful of abstentions). *** Meeting Adjourned ***
Received on Monday, 6 January 1997 14:24:55 UTC