RE: Should I use displayname?

> > That's only the technical answer.  If you were asking for a consensus
> > answer, you can add DAV4J to the list.  It currently treats it as a dead
> > property that gets initialized to the full URI.  It also allows the
client
> > to change the displayname to anything they wish.
>
> As another point of reference:
>
> mod_dav treats it as a dead property and does *not* initialize the value
> to anything. In other words, it (typically) does not exist on a resource.
> If it does, then it only contains whatever somebody happened to shove into
> it -- that could be a JPEG image for all mod_dav cares.

Well, the intent of the displayname property was to provide a mechanism by
which a user could assign a more meaningful name to a resource other than
just the URL.  In particular I was thinking about non-latin character sets
(like Kanji), which are currently poorly handled by existing URLs.

However, this thread is certainly showing that there is an interoperability
problem here. There are two choices:

1) Have the server make it a dead property, initialized to be empty.
Clients would display the last path segment from the href URL
preferentially, but would display the displayname property if set.

2) Have the sever make it a dead property, initialized to the last path
segment of the href URL.  The client would always use the displayname value.

Since client behavior is currently closer to case (1), this might be the
best plan for moving forward.

- Jim

Received on Thursday, 20 January 2000 14:17:44 UTC