- From: Jim Whitehead <ejw@ics.uci.edu>
- Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 14:29:40 -0800
- To: "'WEBDAV WG'" <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
At the Design Team meeting last week, and also during editing between draft-04 and draft-05, many significant changes were made to the protocol document. In general, the main trend of these changes was to remove or repackage features, making a leaner, cleaner design. The post documents these proposed design changes, and indicates which changes are visible in the -05 draft, and which will become visible in the -06 draft. As always, since the mailing list is the key determinant of consensus on the protocol draft, these should be viewed as proposals for changes, and are subject to the review of the mailing list. Key changes: 1. Merge the Tree (recursive) operations specification with the main protocol specification. The original intent of separating these documents was to allow for separate focusing on the semantics of recursive operations versus non-recursive operations. Since the tree draft was stable, and since it was more straightforward to discuss recursive operation in context of an operation's initial definition, the tree draft was merged together with the protocol draft. This change is visible in the -05 draft. 2. Make the PROPFIND method able to work recursively (i.e., find the properties on a single resource, on all resources in a collection, and on all the progeny of a collection). 3. Remove the INDEX method. Since there has been some discussion on providing support for "INDEX with a PROPFIND header" we reexamined the semantics of INDEX, and found that it is really a convenience property lookup mechanism, returning an arbitrary (but useful) set of properties. As a result, we increased the power of PROPFIND, allowing it to work recursively, and in so doing, made INDEX obsolete. Everything that could be done with INDEX before, can now be done with PROPFIND. In the -05 draft, PROPFIND has recursive semantics, but INDEX is there in a very stripped-down form. In the -06 draft, INDEX will be removed. 4. Move versioning to a separate specification. Versioning operations were moved to a separate specification for several reasons. First, the current protocol draft is at 71 pages, and at this length is difficult to review well. A longer specification would only increase this problem. Second, I am planning on holding a working group last call on the protocol document in January, and there is no possible way versioning would be done by this time. By moving versioning to a separate specification, work can proceed on versioning without holding up or being rushed by the distributed authoring draft. However, let me stress that this is not intended to kill work on versioning. There is still extremely strong support within the Design Team to continue working on versioning, and I personally am very commited to seeing this group develop a versioning specification. This change is in the -05 specification. 5. Move PATCH to a separate specification. At present, the PATCH method is "MAY" functionality, and is specified using a home-grown XML difference format. Recent work on HTTP differencing (e.g., gdiff) and on PUT with byteranges (currently under discussion in the HTTP WG) suggest that this method is premature. PATCH is being moved into a separate specification so it can await the maturity of gdiff, and the outcome of the PUT with byteranges discussion. This change will take effect in the -06 specification. 6. Rename methods: COPY -> DUP, MOVE -> RENAME, LOCK ->RESERVE, UNLOCK -> UNRESERVE. The rationale for this change is to avoid a method name conflict with versions 2 and 3 of the Netscape Enterprise Server which contained prototype versions of these methods. This change will take effect in the -06 specification. 7. Move the Destroy header into the versioning draft. Since the Destroy header only had singificance for versioned resources, it makes sense for the Destroy header to follow versioning into a new specification. This change will take effect in the -06 specification. - Jim
Received on Tuesday, 25 November 1997 18:13:59 UTC