RE: property value clarification

> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org
> [mailto:w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Jim Davis
> Sent: Thursday, October 29, 1998 7:42 PM
> To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> Subject: RE: property value clarification
>
>
> At 03:56 PM 10/29/98 PST, Jim Whitehead wrote:
> >...My sense of the working group is there does not currently exist any
> >consensus on this topic.  Nor, given the depth of the issues, is
> it likely
> >that any consensus could be achieved quickly.  My recommendation
> is to leave
> >this issue unresolved, and be silent on this topic within the spec.
>
> I concur, with one exception, namely the xml:lang attribute.  This
> attribute must be recorded in order to provide international support.
> Otherwise there is no way to do correct equality comparisons on
> properties.
>
> I asked specifically about this attribute in email on 7/27, the sole reply
> (8/5, from EJW) indicated that it would be preserved.
>
> It's very important that this attribute be preserved, otherwise DAV is
> limited to English language values only.  (Or to be more precise,
> you could store non-English values, but you couldn't operate on them
reliably.)

Jim Davis is right -- my post should have mentioned explicitly that WebDAV
processors are expected to persistently store language tagging information
found in the xml:lang attribute.  I did not mean that the new requirement
added to section 12.13.2 on persistently storing xml:lang would be removed.

The xml:lang attribute also can profitably be manipulated to minimize the
amount of on-the-wire traffic.  If a property is submitted with the same
xml:lang attribute on every element, a server can quite reasonably replace
this with a single xml:lang attribute on the enclosing element, in this case
the <{propname}> element.

Greg Stein writes:
> There have also been some ruminations about namespace handling; in
> particular, whether the server might rename the prefixes that are used.

There are several cases where the server must rename the prefixes in order
to guarantee uniqueness.  For example, if I use a PROPPATCH method
invocation to set property A, with prefix P="http://foo.org/" and then
another PROPPATCH to set property B, with prefix P="http://bar.org/", then
use PROPFIND to request properties A and B, the reponse will have to change
1 or both of the prefixes for these properties.  The server has to act to
ensure the prefixes are unique in the XML stream.

David Durand writes:
> >We save all attributes on markup within the "contents", but what about
> >attributes on the "propname" element?
>
> This is fine. We can require that propname not have attributes with
> impunity -- anyone who feels they really need them can add a dummy nested
> element to hold all the required global properties they want. In theory,
we
> don't even have to handle the xml:lang attribute, for this reason, but
that
> seems to penalize internationalization in a very bad way.

I think it makes a lot of sense to allow xml:lang to be set on the
<{propname}> element, since many properties will be uniform in their
language and charset, and requiring either the addition of extra elements,
or duplicating xml:lang attributes seem like undesirable solutions.

- Jim

Received on Friday, 30 October 1998 14:43:06 UTC