Re: Anomaly in the DAV:prop element usage

This is an interesting issue--how do specify some set of XML elements that
you want out of a document not available to you.  This is basically the XML
equivalent of a SELECT list in SQL.

I raised this issue in the database context with the W3C people a few months
ago, to raise the issue of a simplified form of XPath for this purpose.  I
proposed basically using a list of XPath identifiers, omitting elements in
the predicate that reference the value of any node.

I'm copying this to some relevant XML & XPath people to highlight WebDAV
PROPFIND requests as another application for this usage in addition to
database data retrieval.  It's kind of disturbing to me to see invalid XML
used for this--I'd prefer a comma separated list of XPath specifications,
omitting predicates, like:

<D:prop xmlns:R="http://www.foo.bar/boxschema/">
 R:bigbox, R:author, D:supportedlock/lockentry/lockscope
</D:prop>

I think this will avoid confusion, since a list of XML element names
shouldn't appear as empty elements.

--Eric

----- Original Message -----
From: "Geoffrey M. Clemm" <geoffrey.clemm@rational.com>
To: <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2000 3:08 PM
Subject: Anomaly in the DAV:prop element usage


>
> In rfc2518, the example of propfind in 8.1.1 issues a PROPFIND
> request with a DAV:prop element of the form:
>
>      <D:prop xmlns:R="http://www.foo.bar/boxschema/">
>           <R:bigbox/>
>           <R:author/>
>           <R:DingALing/>
>           <R:Random/>
>      </D:prop>
>
> It is very likely that this violates at least some of the element
> definitions for R:bigbox, R:author, R:DingALing, and R:Random.
>
> I have gone to some trouble to avoid this kind of element definition
> violation in the versioning spec, but since it didn't bother the
> authors of 2518, should I not let it bother me?  As was pointed out
> in an earlier thread, there are other reasons why WebDAV XML will be
> rejected by validating parsers ...
>
> Cheers,
> Geoff
>
>

Received on Thursday, 6 January 2000 19:56:14 UTC