RE: File creation date, version creation date, and getlastmodifie d

>I am in favor of Lisa's suggestion of having three timestamps.

I'm not sure Lisa was actually making that suggestion :^), but in any 
event I don't like the idea of requiring this kind of timestamping at 
all.  It adds detail to the abstract "DAV resource" that 
unnecessarily biases it towards file-system implementations (where 
content and properties are likely to be stored separately and 
modified independently).

I believe that the modification date property is in DAV because it's 
there in HTTP 1.1.  And its semantics are left vague exactly to allow 
many different implementations.

The move to etags in 1.1 was specifically intended to more generally 
answer the question "has the content of this resource changed."  We 
shouldn't now go back and try to resurrect modification dates as the 
way to find out about content changes.

Similarly, I don't think we should tie modification dates one way or 
the other to property changes. if clients need a way of asking "has 
this resource changed in any way - content or properties" then we 
should add a "property etag" in addition to the "content etag" that 
now exists.

     dan
-- 
Daniel Brotsky, Adobe Systems
tel 408-536-4150, pager 877-704-4062
2-way pager email: <mailto:page-dbrotsky@adobe.com>

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2001 13:41:08 UTC