Re: property value clarification

I happen to agree with Albert Lunde and David Durand here, and have
interpreted the WebDAV drafts as having that meaning. Nowhere have I
read or have been lead to believe that a WebDAV server has semantics for
all properties that are placed into it. Nor that a server is free to
rewrite the content within a property value.

My initial question which created this thread was more about how far the
property value extended within the XML framework which carries it,
versus what the semantic nature of those properties are. Obviously,
people seem to have plenty to discuss on the latter :-).

Allowing a server to rewrite properties that it knows nothing about
would seem quite dangerous. I would much rather see the server reject
the unknown property, than to believe that I can store the property
without fear of losing my (application's) semantics on that property.

Cheers,
-g

Babich, Alan wrote:
> 
> Albert Lunde wrote:
> "This may be reasonable in some other context; but right now, it looks
> me,
> like WEBDAV intends to treat dead properties as containers which can be
> set
> to arbitrary (internationalized) string values, with no further
> knowledge
> of data type and symantics."
> 
> I don't believe that is true. If that were true, then query
> would be hopeless. One can not do query in a satisfactory
> way without facing the data types issue. However, query is
> not hopeless, because your assertion is not true. There are,
> in fact, data types underlying DAV. Otherwise, the model
> would be just junk and should be thrown out. The WebDAV draft
> just does not address data types explicitly. It leaves data
> types to be developed by other DAV efforts, and their
> expression in XML to XML committees.
> 
> "Bringing in the "XML Data" datatypes you refer to would be
> a significant change to WEBDAV."
> 
> I don't believe that it is a change to WebDAV at all. Data
> types were there underneath WebDAV all along, so it is not
> a change to WebDAV. Note that data types are being brought
> into *XML* -- not just WebDAV, *all XML* -- by an XML
> committee. XML Data is a change to XML, not WebDAV. Given
> the existence of XML Data and the fact that WebDAV chose XML
> as it serialization format, it doesn't make sense for WebDAV
> to go off and express datatypes some other way. They
> are simply already there in XML "for free".
> 
> Due to the fast pace of the internet, standards generally
> can not create interdependencies on each other. So, WebDAV
> has no dependency on XML Data. However, certain outcomes
> of related standards efforts are generally anticipated,
> and some effort made to mesh smoothly with them when they
> complete. That is also the reason why only a piece of the
> whole DAV design is in the WebDAV draft. Other pieces are
> in other drafts (e.g., Advanced Collections, Versioning,
> DASL, etc.). That is also partly why the property model
> is not completely explained in the WebDAV draft.
>...

--
Greg Stein (gstein@lyra.org)

Received on Monday, 2 November 1998 01:30:27 UTC