RE: collection with ordered members

Compound documents are not collections. Collections are only used, by
definition, for unordered membership lists. I will make that clearer in
the spec.

If a resource is a collection then it supports INDEX, the opposite is
not necessarily true.

So, for example, someone could PUT a MIME multipart on a server. The
server, which sprekens ze multipart, could automatically support the
INDEX method on that resource. Even better, it could enhance the INDEX
results to include a property which identifies the section ID and
ordering information for the multipart. However this sort of
functionality can be built on top of DAV without requiring any
modifications to DAV.

			Yaron

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Jim Davis [SMTP:jdavis@parc.xerox.com]
> Sent:	Monday, October 20, 1997 8:58 PM
> To:	w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> Subject:	collection with ordered members 
> 
> For certain applications, it is important to be able to specify the
> order
> of members of a collection.  For example,  a compound document made of
> pages wants a well defined order of the pages.
> 
> The spec says nothing whatsoever about the order of members when one
> does
> an INDEX.  It should say something, even if what it says is "no
> promises".
> 
> I would like to have ordered collections, but I can appreciate that in
> the
> interests of simplicity you might not want to support this.  If there
> is
> interest in extending the spec to support ordered collections, I would
> be
> happy to write up some ideas about how to do it.  Basically, I'd
> suggest
> adding headers to PUT and ADDREF allowing you to specify the URI of a
> resource that the resource being added is to come either after or
> before.
> I would not propose any method for re-ordering collections at this
> time.
>

Received on Tuesday, 21 October 1997 01:59:30 UTC