New Advanced Collection Requirements Draft

A new revision of the Advanced Collection Requirements draft is now
available on the Internet-Drafts directory:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-webdav-collection-reqts-0
2.txt

This revision reflects the discussions at Redmond:

1. The "internal member" (directly contained) terminology has been
removed.
References are contrasted with ordinary resources that have content,
not with internal collection members.  

2. State explicitly that the requirements are silent on how the server
maintains referential integrity.

3. State explicitly that there is no requirement that references be
acyclic.

4. The notion of referencing has been separated from the notion of
collections as far as possible.  There are still a few requirements that
relate to references only in the context of collections, but for the
most part the requirements for referencing can be states without mention
of collections.  

5. Ordered Collection Requirements -- No Changes.  Ordered collection
requirements were uncontroversial at Redmond.  The restriction to a
single ordering per collection was revisited and confirmed.  If
additional orderings are desired, they can be achieved by created
separate collections with those orderings (though this would be a
maintenance headache) or on the client side. The suggestion that there
be a requirement relating to scalability and performance was rejected on
the grounds that this is motherhood and can be assumed for any protocol
specification, and that metrics are too difficult to define.

In addition, this revision of the requirements introduces the concepts
of direct vs. indirect references, based on suggestions from Jim Davis
and Roy Fielding.  It tries to state clearly which requirements apply to
direct references, and which to indirect references.

The distinction between strong and weak references also stayed in the
requirements.

The requirements say, however, that the initial collections protocol is
not expected to support either strong references or direct references.

Judith A. Slein
Xerox Corporation
jslein@crt.xerox.com
(716)422-5169
800 Phillips Road 105/50C
Webster, NY 14580

Received on Friday, 24 July 1998 10:52:52 UTC