Re: New Requirements Draft

> I know, I made the same mistake that everyone else did. In the first
> paragraph you site I was using the term variant in the way that I think
> you and Andre mean it. Of course that road leads to madness. That is why

Not necessarily, that is the road that the Configuration Management community 
has been taking for the past 20 years since it has been defined by Tichy the 
way I described. It has been non-confusing, non-madness, and commonly 
understood throughout the software development community to have this meaning.

> So might I suggest we all put our definitions down on the table so we at
> least have some clue as to what we are talking about?

I have done so.

> When I speak of "variant support" I am specifically speaking of putting
> in place commands which instruct a server how it should handle accept*
> headers. Thus if a client puts up a document and marks it as "the French
> variant" it is expected that if the server receives accept-language:
> (whatever the hell the French code is), it will return the French
> version. It is this behavior which I do not wish to have specified by
> DAV because I believe this is more server configuration than document
> authoring. Document authoring is creating a document and putting
> properties on it. One of those properties could even be "Language". But
> it says nothing about how a server will server up that document. Only
> that if you get the URL you PUT the document to, you will get the
> document back.

Again, you define variant in terms of a *solution*. We are talking about a requirements document here, which should have nothing to do with accept headers etc., but instead should contain an abstract definition.

Also, one of properties WebDAV is talking about is versioning. You create a separate mechanism for that, and the server is supposed to serve up particular versions. Sounds like exactly the same problem to me, but in one case you dismiss giving a solution and put it as "server-issue", in the other case you completely embrace a solution (i.e., the versioning HTTP primitives bing created). To me there is no reason to make this distinction.

=== Andre ===

Received on Wednesday, 27 August 1997 16:50:43 UTC