Brief Summary: WebDAV WG meeting at Chicago IETF

Here is a brief summary of the WG meeting that was held at the Chicago IETF
today.  More detailed minutes will be posted when they are available.

The WebDAV working group held a meeting at the Chicago IETF on Thursday,
August 27, 1998, from 1PM to 3PM.  There were 55 people in attendace.  The
meeting was chaired by Jim Whitehead, and minutes were taken by Stephen
Martin, and John Stracke.  Jim Davis began the meeting by leading discussion
on Advanced Collections capability.  This discussion ran through the
Advanced Collections Requirements, followed by the Advanced Collections
Protocol.  The most significant comment concerned the need to clarify the
text to distinguish between a URL, a resource, and a reference.  Jim Davis
recorded several discussion points, which he will take to the discussion
list.

Lisa Lippert next led discussion on the Access Control requirements
document. Participants commented that the document needs to be clear on
whether the goal is to make an access control protocol which exactly maps to
the access control mechanisms of underlying repositories, or whether the
goal is to have an access control protocol which is WebDAV-specific, and
which will likely not map exactly to the access control mechanisms of many
repositories.  The sentiment in the room was to support the latter.

At this point, there was brief discussion of the mailing list thread on
"Hierarchical URLs and collections" which was perceived to be the issue of
whether the same chunk of persistent state can be accessed via multiple
URLs, and if so, whether the WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol
specification needs to set policy for how to handle operations on these
multi-URL chunks of state.  Discussion of this issue will continue on the
list.

Chris Kaler finished the meeting by presenting a summary of the recent
Versioning and Variant Authoring Design Team meeting.  There was brief
discussion of whether it was OK for the Design Team to address automatic
versioning (versioning for downlevel clients), and simple configuration
management support (similar to CVS).  No dissent was raised for addressing
automatic versioning.  Some participants noted that the versioning protocol
might be useful even if it didn't address configuration management, but
didn't object to development along this path.

Received on Thursday, 27 August 1998 17:58:49 UTC