Re: WEBDAV WG Meeting summary

> - The Depth header (and hence recursive semantics for method invocations) 
> should be moved to a separate specification, which will proceed separately 
> from draft-ietf-webdav-protocol.  There was a suggestion to not use a Depth 
> header, but to instead define separate functions (e.g., DEEPCOPY) for the 
> recursive analog to existing methods.

My experience is that recursive or multi-level methods for copying data
structures are actually quite varied, and that the reason for doing the
separation is that you will find that you need more information than
just the depth to determine the actual semantics of the operation, and
that further "copy to N levels" is fundamentally a different operation
than "just copy this top-level operation".

(E.g., as a point to consider, note that typical Lisp language
definitions have had many different copy operations, depending on
how carefully they attempted to preserve structure. While it is
possible to overload a single copy operation just by adding additional
parameters, the implementations were considerably different.) 
-- 
http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter

Received on Monday, 18 August 1997 14:11:15 UTC