- From: Jim Whitehead <ejw@ics.uci.edu>
- Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 13:48:46 -0400
- To: "'John Turner'" <johnt@cgocable.net>
- Cc: "'w3c-dist-auth@w3.org'" <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
John Turner writes: > If the the whole hierarchy is not treated as a collection, you leave open > the possibility of some user confusion. The namespaces of the URLs and the > collections overlap, but are not identical. For example, if you have > collection /A you could have /A/B where B is an internal reference and /A/C > where C is not part of the collection, simply part of the URL space. This > might be useful, but it will certainly be confusing. My assumption has always been that any collection-like object in a DAV server's namespace should be modeled using a WebDAV collection -- an assumption so deeply ingrained none of the authors ever thought it was worth writing down. (Bzzt! :-) I agree a requirement should go into the specification stating that collection-like objects SHOULD be WebDAV collections. My question is whether this should be a MUST or a SHOULD requirement. I'm leaning towards SHOULD because there are cases where part of a server's namespace is computed, and hence can be potentially infinite. For example, if a server has a part of its namespace which acts as input to a cgi script (e.g., http://www.foo.org/finger-script/cgi-bin/user@host) what should INDEX return for the /cgi-bin/ collection if there is a MUST requirement? On the other hand, if it was a MUST requirement, there could be language added which states that a server is not required to expose every member of a collection where the membership depends on the current request. Although I'm unsure what the best way would be to express this, or whether this causes more problems than it solves. - Jim
Received on Friday, 19 September 1997 13:53:51 UTC