RE: Clarification of URI vs. Resource

Yes, except that I'd prefer to keep this discussion about identifiers
separate from referencing, which is addressed in the advanced collections
spec.  Actually, the 09 WebDAV spec says that DELETE on a collection deletes
the collection and all of its member resources.  If the spec gets rewritten
to treat URIs as collection members, that might result in the behavior you
want for deletion -- that only the member URIs would get deleted with the
collection, not the resources they identify.  Then, as you say, something
different has to happen when you delete the last collection that has a
member URI identifying a particular resource.

In the advanced collections spec, where references are discussed, things
already behave more like what you describe.  It's the reference that is a
member of the collection, so when the collection gets deleted, the
references (not the resources they point to) get deleted with the
collection.  So you can never delete a resource by deleting a reference to
it -- not even by deleting the last reference to it.

Judith A. Slein
CR&T/ADSTC
jslein@crt.xerox.com
8*222-5169


> -----Original Message-----
> From: ccjason@us.ibm.com [mailto:ccjason@us.ibm.com]
> Sent: Friday, November 13, 1998 4:05 PM
> To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Clarification of URI vs. Resource
> 
> 
> 
> Judy,
> 
>    I'd have to roughly agree with my interpretation of 
> everything you said
> except...
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I'd hope that this DELETE actually only removes the 
> collection resource and
> it's references (for lack of a better word) to it's member 
> resources.  (And
> as a result, various URI's would become invalid.) I'd also 
> hope that no
> actual member *resources* would be destroyed... except 
> possibly those that
> no longer have any (strong?) references to them.
> 
> Maybe that's what you meant also?
> 
> Jason.
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Friday, 13 November 1998 18:33:53 UTC