Re: WEBDAV: IETF 44 Brief Summary

Jim Whitehead wrote:
> ...
> Sorry this was so brief -- WG chairs are required to produce a brief summary
> of their WG's meeting, in addition to a full set of minutes for the meeting.
> So, there will be better minutes int he future.

No problem. I appreciate the extended response, before the minutes
arrived.

> People were interested in a registry, but there was concern on two points:
> 
> 1) There are two views of property reuse.  One view (which I held prior to
> the meeting) was that properties can be individually reused, and hence it
> might be reasonable to pluck out the "author" property from the Dublin Core
> and use it without using the rest of the Dublin Core properties.  The other
> view is that even individual properties are bound into a schema definition,
> and cannot readily be unbundled from the rest of their schema.
> 
> Based on this, it probably makes sense to register properties as schemas,
> rather than as individual properties (which was my view on this).

Okay, I can see that. I'm not sure I buy into it, but I'll take the WG's
word that a schema-based registration is best. (maybe the minutes will
elucidate the issue, so I'll wait for those)

> 2) There was also concern that DAV properties may not exist independently of
> other protocol elements, and hence registering just properties may not be
> enough.  For example, it is possible to define a long-time-duration RPC
> mechanism using properties. For example, client A stores a request in a
> property, then waits.  Next, client B retrieves the request from the
> property, executes the request, then stores the result back in the property.
> Later, client A goes back to retrieve the result.  In such a case,
> registering the property isn't sufficient, since what is really going on is
> a protocol.

I think in this case, the registry would simply need to indicate that
"additional material" is available for the registered schema. I think it
makes a lot of sense to allow for add'l information to be stored with
the registry (authors, web sites, RFCs, etc).

> None of these suggest to me that creating a property registry is a bad idea,
> just that it may be more subtle than it originally seemed, and the
> granularity of registration is probably a whole schema.

No problem. This just affects the database schema (pun intended :-) for
the registry.

When I get the registry up (by next week maybe?), I'll pre-load it with
Lisa's property draft and we'll go from there.

Cheers,
-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/

Received on Monday, 22 March 1999 22:53:36 UTC