- From: Slein, Judith A <JSlein@crt.xerox.com>
- Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 11:23:30 -0500
- To: "'WebDAV'" <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
Here's the way I wish things worked: Collections are resources, and their members are resources, and membership in a collection has nothing to do with what identifiers are used for the collection or its members. Methods are defined for creating and deleting collections, adding and removing collection members, copying and moving collections, listing collection members, and listing the collections a resource belongs to. (Only the last of these is missing today.) So we never have to rely on the syntax of identifiers for any of these operations. MOVE resource R from collection C1 to collection C2 just means if you do a PROPFIND on C1, you will no longer see R in the result set, and if you do a PROPFIND on C2, you will see R in the result set. It implies nothing about identifiers for R. DELETE collection C1 means that C1 and all of its member resources are gone, not just that certain identifiers for those resources don't work any more. Eventually we need to ask, can there be collections that weren't created with MKCOL? In particular, may the file system directory hierarchies that many Web servers expose be collections? We want to say, yes. All that's necessary is that the Web server support PROPFIND, etc., for those resources. May a server decide that some of the resources in the file system directories are collection members and others are not? Yes, that might be confusing to users, but it could be done. We expect that mostly servers would decide to have their URL namespaces exactly mirror collection hierarchies, so that mostly it would be possible to deduce collection membership from the URL syntax, but no one should ever rely on this. --Judy Judith A. Slein Xerox Corporation jslein@crt.xerox.com (716)422-5169 800 Phillips Road 105/50C Webster, NY 14580
Received on Friday, 13 November 1998 11:20:29 UTC