Re: Structured Resources

Yaron Goland writes:
| Documents have structure and it would seem a good thing for DAV to
| expose this structure and make it available for manipulation. As such I
| propose a new Method, STRUCTURE. When executed on a resource this method
| will return a description of the structure of the document.

This suggestion touches on points of interest in several other contexts.
Partly with those contexts in mind, a few requests for clarification:

| I recommend that the structure of a resource be expressed as a list of
| URIs, some relative, some not, along with associated meta-data. The
| STRUCTURE method returns this list.

How does the (flat?) list of URIs map to the structure of a document
that can be in any arbitrary format?  By the metadata?  What is the
format of the metadata?

| One method for adding to the structure of a document is to PUT a new
| resource, where the request-URI has the same base as the structure
| resource. Thus if the structured resource is http://foo then
| http://foo/bar specifies a member of foo's structure.

How is the relationship of bar to other members of foo indicated, and
in what context?  If I PUT a bar, how does my interlocutor know where
in foo bar should go?  Would I not have to PUT bar plus at least an
outline of the new structure of foo, as modified by the addition of
bar?


Regards,
  Terry Allen    Electronic Publishing Consultant    tallen[at]sonic.net
       specializing in Web publishing, SGML, and the DocBook DTD 
                   http://www.sonic.net/~tallen/
  A Davenport Group Sponsor:  http://www.ora.com/davenport/index.html

Received on Monday, 17 March 1997 21:49:59 UTC