RE: Use of DAV properties for structural protocol elements

At 08:07 AM 12/23/98 PST, Slein, Judith A wrote:

I agree with what you say about not copying live properties, but I don't
agree with your proposed solution.


>2.  Because clients will want to display for users only descriptive
>properties, maybe we need an attribute of properties: IsDescriptive
>(boolean).  And a new element for use with PROPFIND -- descriptiveprop --
>which retrieves all descriptive properties, in contrast to allprop, which
>retrieves all properties, both descriptive and operational.

I totally don't believe this. 

First of all, some clients will want to display 'operational' or
'structural' properties, too.  For sure, when we have a client that
accesses the NT file system via WebDAV, I want to see structural properties
such as locking and permissions. 

Second, some clients will display only those properties they understand
(either because they wrote them or because they are standardized, as e.g.
Dublin Core or GILS), but others will attempt to display *all* properties,
whether they mean anything to the client or the user or not, in some
'generic' way.  The WebDAV client I wrote does this.  It displays
DAV:displayname as the 'name' of the resource, it translates
DAV:creationdate from GMT to local time, but properties it does not know it
just shows as indented quasi-XML.

Finally, I doubt the distinction between descriptive and operational can be
formallized well enough that we could standardize it.

Likewise, the example you gave

> Other
>operational properties, whose presence indicates support for some optional
>WebDAV functionality, cannot be copied if the destination is on a part of
>the server (or on another server) that does not support the related
>functionality (DAV:supportedlock, DAV:reftype, etc.).  

seems like a red herring to me.  I doubt that servers will ever support
copying resources to other servers, it's too much of a security problem.  I
suppose it's possible that a server might have two different areas with
different functionality, but this seems unlikely to me.  When I see one,
I'll believe it.

As I said in another email, I think 8.8.2 should be re-written to say that
if live property can not be copied live it MUST NOT be copied at all.

Received on Thursday, 31 December 1998 15:51:56 UTC