Requirements feedback

I have just finished reading through the latest requirements draft, and 
have a few minor comments of my own.  In general, though, the document is 
in very good shape, and I think we'll be able to submit it to the IESG 
later this month.

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Section 1, "Introduction", para. 2:
  "This document is intended to reflect the consensus of the WWW 
Distributed Authoring and Versioning working group (WebDAV) ..."

Change to:

  "This document reflects the consensus of the ..."

Rationale:
  Since this document will only be sent to the IESG is there is rough 
consensus in the working group on the requirements document, the document 
will reflect the consensus of the group at that time.

----

Section 4.5, "Replicated, Distributed Systems"
  Remove the sentence, "Resources may have properties on different 
servers."

Also change:
  "Any resources may be cached or replicated..."
to:
  "Any resource may be cached or replicated..."

Rationale:
  Since the current notion of a property is an attribute/value pair which 
is stored as part of the state of a resource, this requirement would entail 
splitting the state of a resource across different servers.  I think the 
intent of this might have been that linking to other resources would allow 
large-chunk metadata to be associated with a resource.

----

Section 5.7.1.1 and 5.7.2.1 (Functional Requirements of Copy and Move)
  Remove the sentence concerning octet for octet copy and move.

Rationale:
  It strikes me that specifying the exact characteristics of a copy or move 
in the requirements is a bit odd, that this level of detail should be left 
to the protocol specification, and not the requirements document.  Another 
reason for removing these sentences is that, due to the existence of live 
properties, the destination resource of a copy or move operation may not be 
octet-for-octet identical since the live properties are recomputed after 
the copy/move operation.

----

Section 5.10.2 (Variants Rationale)

I recommend we add a note stating that it is the intent of the group to 
develop a separate fine-grain requirements and protocol document on the 
topic of variants.  This would treat variants in a similar way to the 
access control requirements document, which also has a pointer in this 
requirements document.

----

Section 5.11.3 (Interoperability with Security Protocols)

Change:
"The WebDAV specification should provide a minimal set of security 
protocols which any compliant server / client should support."

To:
"The WebDAV specification must provide a minimal set of security protocols 
which any compliant server / client must support."

Rationale:
The IESG has been very clear in stating they will not accept any new 
standards-track protocols if they do not address security in a substantive 
way.  Changing these shoulds to musts is consistent with this.

----

References:

The access control requirements document needs to be listed as an 
"unpublished manuscript.  The URL for this draft is:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/1997AprJun/0183.html


- Jim

Received on Thursday, 18 September 1997 17:22:29 UTC