Re: Update to draft-ietf-webdav-dublin-core

"David G. Durand" wrote:

> If it supports no such feature, we have already lost searchability of
> multiple valued Dublin attributes anyway, since only signle values will be
> effectively searchable at the server end.

But this applies to any structured DAV property.  The DASL group has discussed
the possibility of searching structured properties, and (as far as I can
tell) has not given up yet (there's a proposal on the table from Alan, though I
don't see any responses on the list).

> The alternative is to have a single property: DAV:DublinMetadata that
> contains the entire XML representation of the meta-data. That will, I am
> pretty sure, be defined eventually by the Dublin core folks, and we simply
> need to reserve the attribute, and describe its purpose.

But this will make things even less searchable, and much less manageable.

> This is actually rather unpleasant: the use of ordered list tags from
> another DTD to indicate multiple values is a pretty serious case of tag
> abuse.

What's wrong with defining <ol> in a property (or at least a Dublin Core
property) to have the meaning we need?

> A namespace declaration needs to be part of the property, and so should
> appear in the example.

OK, I'll add it.

> or we start needing to store parallel synchronized lists in different
> properties, which is a pain for clients, and harder for servers (and pretty
> much requires a big implementation, as it won't work with simple dead
> property storage, which seems pretty bad to me.

I disagree--the DAV server just sees them as separate dead properties; it doesn't
have to know that there's any relationship among them.

> This solve the property naming problem, but not the fact that we need a way
> to synchronize several such values into a single creator.

OK, here's your straight line: Why?

--
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|John (Francis) Stracke    |My opinions are my own.|S/MIME supported |
|Software Retrophrenologist|=========================================|
|Netscape Comm. Corp.      | Know your limits, then destroy 'em.     |
|francis@netscape.com      |                                         |
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Received on Thursday, 8 October 1998 13:15:38 UTC