RE: Clarification of URI vs. resource

There is no requirement that DAV enabled resources be in a DAV collection.
Section 5.1 of 09 specifically states that DAV does not require the
namespace to be consistent. Thus you can have DAV resources which do not
necessarily have a DAV parent. The only rule is that if you do have a DAV
resource and if it does have a parent (a term defined in spec) and that
parent is DAV compliant then that parent MUST be a collection.

			Yaron



-----Original Message-----
From: Roy T. Fielding [mailto:fielding@kiwi.ics.uci.edu]
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 1998 2:54 PM
To: ejw@ics.uci.edu
Cc: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
Subject: Re: Clarification of URI vs. resource 


>Roy Fielding agreed:
>> I'll agree with Larry here -- I've been staying out of the debate
>> largely because I don't understand the need for the requirement at all.
>
>The only problem is that I don't understand what constraint they're talking
>about! Is this a discussion of case sensitivity, or namespace consistency?

My comment was regarding the requirement that DAV capable resources be
within a DAV collection.  There is no need for that requirement and it
is the root of many terminology issues.  Any individual resource is
capable of being or not being DAVable, as determined by either the
capabilities described by an OPTIONS response or by the error response
received when attempting to do a WebDAV operation on a non-DAV resource.
"Save as..." dialogs are cool, but not necessary, for authoring.

Eliminating the unnecessary requirement also removes any need to talk
about how many different URI reference the same resource, or what
might be the canonical preferred URI for a given resource.  It just
doesn't matter if the definition is based on the request semantics
instead of a paricular idealized model of the URI namespace.
Instead, just define what a collection contains (its own namespace)
and how to get a representation of that collection.

This was also the meat of the primary (aside from locking) objection
raised in Mark Anderson's critique of section 5 within
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/1998OctDec/0099.html>.
In fact, I'd recommend replacing much of the existing section 5 with
the text he articulated, or at least merge it in so that it is clear
what motivates the discussion and explain why the "source resource"
reference is actually the most significant bit that DAV adds to HTTP.
Because it is, and I'm getting a tired of explaining what a server is
supposed to do when a client tries to PUT to a derived resource.

....Roy

Received on Thursday, 12 November 1998 19:46:04 UTC