Re: DELETE in WebDAV Collections, URI to filename mappings, legacy servers

Just one minor terminological note.  I'd like to make sure that we
don't confuse the concepts of mapping a URL to a resource with any
games the server may play in associating underlying files in the
file systems to a resource.  In particular:

   From: Jim Whitehead <ejw@ics.uci.edu>

    /url1.html   /url2.html
      |           /
      |          /
     resource "1"
      |           \
      |             \
      |               \
     /html/url1.html  /html/url2.html

   That is, have a one to many mapping of a resource to files in the
   filesystem.  This is permitted behavior, and is in fact the only way to
   implement multiple variants of a single resource using a file system
   repository.  One url is mapped to one resource, which is mapped to several
   files, one file per representation of the resource.

We could perhaps use a term "implements" instead of "mapping", i.e.:

"That is, a resource can be implemented by several files in the
filesystem.  This is permitted behavior, and is in fact the only way to
implement multiple variants of a single resource using a file system
repository.  One url is mapped to one resource, which is implemented by
several files, one file per representation of the resource."

   The benefit from a filesystem perspective is that /html/url2.html is only a
   hard link, not a copy.

   Now, when an UNBIND occurs, the picture changes to:

		 /url2.html
		  /
		 /
     resource "1"
		  \
		    \
		      \
		      /html/url2.html

   Now, admittedly, this behavior causes problems for those proposed
   definitions of UNBIND which prevented state changes on the server,
   suggesting those definitions may need some tweaking...

I don't think that the proposed definitions (or at least, my proposed
definition :-) of UNBIND prevented state changes on the server.  To the
contrary, it explicitly *avoids* saying anything about state changes
on the server beyond the change to the advanced collection from which
the binding was removed.

Cheers,
Geoff

Received on Saturday, 1 May 1999 23:45:19 UTC