data about properties

At 01:25 PM 1/24/98 PST, Jim Davis wrote:
>2.5 says "a property name is ... associated with a schema that provides
>information about the syntax and semantics of the property"

Just to elaborate on (my own) question:

As far as I know, DAV does not provide any means whereby a client can
determine any of the following
 is property P (on server S) live or dead?
 if it is live
   is it readonly?
   the syntax (a date, an integer, a 1# list of properties, etc
   intended semantics (stated in natural language, not some formal lang)

(Well, perhaps it could be done by trial and error!)

Nor are there conventions whereby clients could assert similar such
information about dead properties.  (The server would not enforce them, but
at least clients could say what they meant.)

These are desirable, but not mandatory.  In particular they could go into a
future spec.  I am sure that RDF, to name only one technology, would be of
sufficient expressive power to handle this.

The point of this mailnote with regards to the current specification is to
ask that a sentence of two be inserted to say that this is NOT in WebDAV
now, (so don't bother looking for it) and perhaps to point to current work
that might lead to it, because it's a very natural thing to want to have,
and many readers will likely wonder.

I should also point out that the DMA API
<http://www.aiim.org/industry/standards/#dma> *does* provide this kind of
data about properties, so it's not impossible to design or even implement.

Received on Monday, 26 January 1998 12:28:55 UTC