Additional WebDAV Requirements?

First of all, please excuse me if I have arrived too late to participate in meaningful discussion about WebDAV. I have only recently discovered its existence. Nonetheless, having read RFC 2291, I believe there may be a need for an additional level of requirements concerning access privileges. It occurred to me while reading the discussion of locking. The RFC states that it should be possible to remove locks. It says nothing about under what circumstances, or by whom. With respect to locking and reservations, it is critical that a mechanism be supported to release dangling locks or reservations. In other words, an author locks a resource and then disappears from the face of the earth. Someone else must be able to release the lock. Most if not all distributed authoring environments support this functionality through the general notion of superuser or administrator access. This leads me to believe that the general question of levels of access deserves inclusion in WebDAV. For example, it may be desirable to allow certain users to edit particular resources, while only certain other users may move, rename, or delete particular resources.

Comments?

Jeff Sussna

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Kuantech                                    
Distributed Content Architectures for Mission-Critical Online Systems
http://www.kuantech.com

Jeffrey E. Sussna, Principal
jes@kuantech.com