Washington IETF Summary

Below is a brief summary of the WEBDAV WG meetings which took place last 
week.  More detailed minutes are under preparation.

- Jim

WEBDAV Working Group Summary

The WEBDAV working group met two times at the Washington IETF meeting, on 
Monday
and Tuesday, December 8-9, 1997, and 78 people attended one or both of the 
sessions.
The first session began with a mini-BOF on the topic of WEBDAV searching 
and locating
(DASL), which was led by Saveen Reddy.  During this mini-BOF, the goals of 
the
working group were presented, and some discussion on the group took place. 
 Attendees
notes that there was overlap between the issues being considered by LESSOR 
and
DASL, however there was some agreement that DASL would be able to build 
upon the
work of the LESSOR group.  At the end of the mini-BOF, a poll of the 
attendees
found substantial, but not unanimous, support for having a DASL working 
group in the
IETF.

After the DASL mini-BOF, the WEBDAV session begain with a status report on 
the current documents being developed by the working group, including the 
creation of a new versioning protocol specification, now that the main 
protocol document is focused on distributed authoring capability. During 
this status report, the chair announced that there will be a working group 
last call on the distributed authoring protocol document in January.

A discussion of open issues in the distributed authoring protocol 
specification took place during the remainder of the session. 
 Functionality for ordered collections was discussed,
with debate centering on what kind of ordered collection support should be 
provided, and
whether the support should be mandatory given the processing burden on 
servers.  No
resolution was reached, discussion will continue on the list.  Security 
considerations
were discussed next, and the group reached agreement that a) the security 
considerations
from HTTP/1.1 need to be reviewed to ensure they are unchanged for the 
domain of distributed authoring, b) WEBDAV will mandate use of digest 
authentication, c) for cases where greater security that an unencoded 
session is needed, use TLS will be recommended.  Finally,
the working group agreed with the decisions of the Design Team that the 
INDEX method be removed in conjunction with adding recursive capability to 
PROPFIND, and the PATCH
method be moved to the versioning specification.

Access Control was the topic of the second WEBDAV session.  Howard Palmer 
led discussion on WEBDAV access control by presenting a series of slides 
highlighting design issues.  One thread discussed the problem of underlying 
repositories having access control schemes which vary (e.g., by operating 
system), the difficulty of mapping different schemes into each other, and 
the challenge this poses for WEBDAV access control.  No consensus was 
reached (none was expected) and discussion on access control will continue 
on the mailing list.

Received on Sunday, 14 December 1997 20:52:17 UTC