RE: Structured Resources

This same type of issue came up with meta data. I believe the decision
we made then applies here. If it isn't critical to implementing the DAV
spec, then it shouldn't be in the spec. How is providing a structure for
HTML, critical to implementing the DAV spec?

Also, why would anyone even write a structure for HTML? It was never
designed to be interpreted in that way. Now, if you would like to have a
spec on how OLE compound files, MHTML files, e-mail files, etc. have
structure, it will be easy to accommodate you.

As for legacy, I don't understand the issue. If a piece of software is
faulty, it is faulty. A server should not expose a structure on a
resource it can not properly interpret. Using Jim's example, the product
Jim used should not have accepted a file it could not understand.

		Yaron

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Ron Daniel, Jr. [SMTP:rdaniel@acl.lanl.gov]
> Sent:	Wednesday, March 26, 1997 2:17 PM
> To:	Yaron Goland; 'Jim Whitehead'; w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> Subject:	RE: Structured Resources
> 
> At 12:16 PM 3/26/97 -0800, Yaron Goland wrote:
> >The goal in proposing structure is very simple - Resources have
> >structure and I felt it would be a good thing to provide a standard
> >mechanism for gaining access to that structure.
> 
> I agree with the sentiment, but am in stronger agreement with Jim
> that it is unclear on how to determine and communicate resource
> structure.
> 
> >My own opinion is that the proper
> >solution to this problem is the introduction of a standard for how
> one
> >exposes the structure of an HTML or any other content type.
> [...]
> >I am further proposing that DAV contribute two of these standards.
> One
> >standard for history and another standard for basic directories. But,
> >just as we are depending on groups like Dublin to fill out the
> meta-data
> >types, so we will be depending upon groups in the IETF to provide
> >standards for other content types.
> 
> I think that, at a minimum, you would have to provide a specification
> for
> describing structure in HTML as well. In the absence of an existance
> proof,
> I'm unconvinced that a reasonable job can be done on it. I suspect
> there
> are a lot of really hard problems that you won't encounter with the
> two
> example standards you propose to use. Jim mentoned one, bad
> translation
> from a legacy document. Besides, until HTML has such a standard, a lot
> of
> the promise of the STRUCTURE method for DAV goes unfulfilled.
> 
> It may be the case that a credible job on HTML can be done
> by a simple approach - expose only the "important" tags like <head>,
> <body>, <H#>, <blockquote>, <HR>, <DL>, <UL>, etc. Later approaches
> would
> presumably do better at coping with all the bizzare tag abuse we know
> lurks on the web. How are clients and servers to know what structure
> extraction approach is used? Don't they need agreement on that so the
> client has a way of marking the structures for the user? If they do,
> then
> is a negotiation mechanism necessary? (I sure hope not).
> 
> Just some of the questions that arise...
> 
> Ron Daniel Jr.              voice:+1 505 665 0597
> Advanced Computing Lab        fax:+1 505 665 4939
> MS B287                     email:rdaniel@lanl.gov
> Los Alamos National Lab      http://www.acl.lanl.gov/~rdaniel
> Los Alamos, NM, USA, 87545

Received on Thursday, 27 March 1997 00:46:29 UTC