RE: proposal for ordered collections

Jim,

Thank you for posting this proposal for ordered collection support in the 
WebDAV protocol.

While at first read, this proposal appears to adequately provide for 
ordered collections, I wonder about its hidden assumption: that one 
ordering for a collection is all you need.  I wonder whether it might be 
desirable to support multiple simultaneous orderings instead.

A brief sketch of how this could be accomplished is to have a predefined 
"ordering" property defined on a collection.  This property could then have 
multiple orderings defined within it.  A client which was interested in the 
ordering could read the "ordering" property, and then make use of one of 
the orderings in the property.  Each ordering could be supported by a 
different schema. Modifying the ordering is accomplished by modifying the 
property.

An example "ordering" property is:

<?XML:NAMESPACE HREF="http://www.ietf.org/standards/dav/" AS="d"?>
<?XML:NAMESPACE HREF="http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/davprop/" AS="j"?>
<?XML:NAMESPACE HREF="http://www.parc.xeroc.com/davprop/" AS="x"?>
<d:ordering>
  <j:alphaorder>
     <d:href>http://foo.bar.com/collection/body.html</d:href>
     <d:href>http://foo.bar.com/collection/conclusion.html</d:href>
     <d:href>http://foo.bar.com/collection/intro.html</d:href>
  </j:alphaorder>

  <x:compound>
     <d:href>http://foo.bar.com/collection/intro.html</d:href>
     <d:href>http://foo.bar.com/collection/body.html</d:href>
     <d:href>http://foo.bar.com/collection/conclusion.html</d:href>
  </x:/compound>
</d:ordering>

This could also be accomplished using the RDF data model and XML 
representation.

- Jim

On Wednesday, December 03, 1997 11:05 PM, Jim Davis 
[SMTP:jdavis@parc.xerox.com] wrote:
> This is a proposal to modify WebDAV to include support for ordered
> collections.
>
> I have already stated the case for this feature elsewhere, and Jim
> Whitehead has neatly summarized it.  Moreover, I believe I have
> refuted all objections thus far raised to it without being (as yet)
> further rebutted.  I agreed to define the proposal more formally, and
> here I do so, although the credit for this definition more properly
> goes to Judy Slein, who did all the work, but as she was too busy to
> write it up, I am submitting it. Of course she should not be blamed
> for the errors I introduce here.
>
>...

Received on Thursday, 4 December 1997 17:41:22 UTC