Re: Issue: ALLPROP_AND_COMPUTED

At 12:45 PM -0400 5/4/01, Jason Crawford wrote:
>As it stands now, I have a mild preference for leaving allprop in.  I'm
>*very* willing to support another position if it will bring us to agreement
>and not do any serious damage.

That was the point I was trying to make (apparently not very well :^) 
in my earlier message.  The problem with leaving ALLPROP in is that 
we're clearly going to be changing its semantics (e.g., forbidding 
depth infinity) so existing clients are likely to stop working and 
will need updates.  Plus leaving it in but changing its semantics may 
mean that existing clients will seem to work but in fact give 
erroneous results.  Plus it means we actually have to *agree* about 
its semantics, which is apparently not going to be easy.

Deprecating it is a much cleaner way to change its semantics: servers 
who wish to can still honor it (keeping old clients working) and 
servers that don't can just refuse it (breaking old clients cleanly). 
Clients who update can go to using PROPNAME/PROPFIND pairs and so 
work against all servers.

I think the only problem with this plan is that folks are worried 
about the extra work clients will have to do to do PROPNAME/PROPFIND 
pairs (with unioning) rather than a simple ALLPROP.  So I ask again 
(as a client implementor who doesn't mind doing this):  are there any 
client-side folks out there who believe the extra work is too 
onerous?  And, if so, do you have clear requirements for what an 
updated ALLPROP needs to do in order to work for you?

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

Received on Friday, 4 May 2001 14:48:49 UTC