New WebDAV Collection Protocol Specification

As you saw from the Internet-Drafts announcement, there is a new draft
of the WebDAV Collections Protocol specification.  Until Jim gets back
to make it available from the WebDAV Web site, you will have to access
it from the Internet Drafts directory:

ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-webdav-collection-protocol
-01.txt

The major changes made since the previous draft are:

General Changes:

1. All dependencies on the Mandatory Extensions draft specification were
removed.
2. Security Considerations have been added.
3. i18n Considerations have been added.
4. Status codes have been added.
5. Examples have been added.

Referencing:

1. The MKREF method is defined for creating a referential resource.
2. Strong references are not supported in the current protocol, but
headers and properties are defined to allow future extension to support
strong references: Ref-Integrity with "Weak" and DAV:refintegrity with
weak.
3. Definitions of  direct / indirect references have been added. This
spec supports only indirect references, but provides hooks for future
support for direct references: Ref-Integrity, refintegrity,
Pass-Through, passthrough, DELREF.
4. Discussion of GET, HEAD, POST, PUT has been revised to insure that
plain HTTP clients can make use of WebDAV referential resources.

Ordering:

1. To improve scaleability, the DAV:ordering property has been removed.
Clients use the Position header to set / modify a member's position in
the collection ordering.
2. A new ORDERPATCH method is defined for changing a collection member's
position in the collection ordering.
3. DAV:orderingtype is now a separate, editable property.  Clients edit
this property to change a collection from unordered to ordered or vice
versa, or to change the ordering semantics of a collection.
4. An Ordered header is defined for use with MKCOL to specify that a
collection is to be ordered.  Its value is either a URI identifying the
semantics of the ordering, or "DAV:arbitrary" for unordered collections.
5. The value "At" <index> has been removed from the Position header.

Judith A. Slein
CR&T/ADSTC
jslein@crt.xerox.com
8*222-5169

Received on Friday, 31 July 1998 10:55:47 UTC