RE: Advanced collections and ordering

The intent was not to provide any protocol support for server-maintained orderings.

As the spec currently stands, a server that doesn't claim to support DAV ordering is, of course, free to do whatever it likes.  But if a server claims to support DAV ordering for a given collection, it can't do server-maintained ordering on that collection.  Maybe this is a bad thing.

The one thing I think we *don't* want to do is require servers to provide server-maintained orderings in order to be compliant with DAV ordering.

We could do something minimal, as has been proposed for strong references, and provide a way for servers to advertise the server-maintained orderings they can offer.  If the client chose one of those orderings, the server would reject any attempts by the client to set the position of collection members in the ordering, and would be responsible for maintaining the ordering itself.
 
--Judy

Judith A. Slein
Xerox Corporation
jslein@crt.xerox.com
(716)422-5169
800 Phillips Road 105/50C
Webster, NY 14580


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Max Rible [mailto:max@glyphica.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 1999 6:45 PM
> To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Advanced collections and ordering
> This seems to me an excellent summary of client-maintained orderings.
> What about server-maintained ones?  While the advanced 
> collection protocol
> document and its requirements document do not directly address
> server-maintained orderings, neither do they disallow them.
> The language of section 5 of the advanced collection protocol document
> does a very good job of describing server-maintained orderings as well
> as client-maintained ones.  Do the folks in the collections protocol
> group intend to disallow server-maintained orderings entirely?
 
> While a DASL search could be used to provide simple orderings of
> collections, I would suggest recommending against using it that way, 
> or making it very explicit in the DASL specification that an 
> optimized path
> to the most popular simple searches (sort by name, extension, size,
> various timestamps) should be available.  The overhead of invoking
> a search engine that does thesaurus lookups and natural language 
> query parsing and multiple accesses of index files-- when all you
> really need to do is juggle some bits you read out of one directory--
> would make such orderings very inefficient unless the programmer(s)
> implementing DASL went through a great deal of effort to optimize
> certain queries as degenerate cases.
> 
> While there is no need to explicitly define server-maintained 
> orderings
> for the advanced collections protocol, it would be good to 
> make explicit
> the interaction of the protocol with server-maintained orderings, just
> as there are explicit provisions for future standards involving strong
> references without actually nailing them down.
> 
> -- 
> %% Max Rible %% max@glyphica.com %% 
> http://www.amurgsval.org/~slothman/ %%
> %% "Before 
> enlightenment:  sharpen claws, catch mice.                   %%
> %%  After enlightenment:  sharpen claws, catch mice."         
>    - me   %%
>

Received on Thursday, 11 March 1999 09:53:17 UTC