[zodiac@holoweb.net: Re: Issue: PROP_ATTR]

----- Forwarded message from Laurie Harper <zodiac@holoweb.net> -----

From: Laurie Harper <zodiac@holoweb.net>
Subject: Re: Issue: PROP_ATTR
To: Greg Stein <gstein@lyra.org>
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 11:38:41 -0400

Greg Stein wrote:
> IMO, PROP_ATTR is about defining the boundary between property naming, and a
> property's value.

I'd say this is exactly scope of the issue.  There is no reason why a
property's value should be considered to be XML just because it is
transported in an XML encoding.

The problem is that, if the characters between the property's start and end
tag *look like* XML then they are likely going to get processed by the DAV
server *as* XML, meaning that byte-for-byte equivalence between the input
and the stored value is unlikely to be easily achievable.

Since an XML fragment can always be escaped (via a CDATA section or what
have you) so that it does not get processes as XML by the DAV server's
parser, all that is necessary is to define what the server is required to do
with property values that are specified as inline XML.  In that case,
requiring the server to preserve all info items defined by the XML Infoset
is probably the strictest reasonable constraint.

So, what does that imply about preserving attributes on the property's
enclosing element?  As I see it, xml:lang and namespace declaration
attributes are directly significant, as are any other namespaces in scope. 
All other attributes are part of the Infoset of the property's XML encoding
but are *not* part of the property value itself (how would such an attribute
contribute to a Base64 encoded jpeg image property value, for example?).

That can all be summed up consistently by saying that a property's value is
the Infoset of the property's element content.  In the case of a non-XML
(plain text) value this is just the text value; for structured XML, that
places only reasonable requirements on the DAV server.


L.
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----- End forwarded message -----

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

Received on Saturday, 14 April 2001 00:15:08 UTC