Advanced Status Reporting and XML vs HTML

A couple issues from the discussion of advanced status reporting in San
Diego:

1)  Somebody suggested looking at the discussion that occurred in Australia
w.r.t. status reporting.  I can't find it:  it seems only the DeltaV group
met in Australia, and they didn't post their meeting notes.  I've looked at
the main WebDAV mailing list traffic for Jan to Sept 2000, and can't see an
obvious thread about either Australia meeting notes or status reporting.
What should I be looking for?

2)  Roy suggested that the machine-parsable XML be embedded inside HTML.
Sean objected that this is actually much harder to find and expose than one
might like.  My opinion is that a client that wants the XML will not want
the HTML, and vice versa.

So, my proposal is to kill two birds with one stone.  We pretty much agreed
that the client should advertise its support for this feature in requests,
presumably by adding a header.  It's straight-forward to allow this header
to provide information on what kind of thing the client wants to receive.

Request header: "DAV-status-response"
Header parameters:
 - user-text
 - response-format

E.g.:
  DAV-status-response: user-text=T; content-type="text/xml"

For the purposes of this specification:
 - user-text can take the values T or F.  A value of F means that the server
does not need to bother to provide any text for user display, whether in XML
or HTML, because the client will ignore it.
 - response-format should be a comma-separated list of acceptable formats
for the status-response body.  "text/xml" will include the elements already
discussed. "text/html" tells the server it may return HTML with error text,
which many already do.

For the future:
 - user-text parameter coud take additional values like "extended"
 - response-format could be some other format, or list of formats.

Does this seem reasonable?  Anybody have other suggestions?

lisa

Received on Tuesday, 19 December 2000 16:02:37 UTC