Re: Moving DASL to Experimental

Hi,

I'm looking for other parties that would be interested on working on DASL
again. With the current status of the spec I have mainly two problems, both
of which apply to the basicsearch grammar:

1) The spec is completely silent about how the grammar engine is supposed to
know about data types. For instance, I would suspect that property values
for getcontentlength are supposed to be compared as numbers, while
getlastmodified need a date comparison.

2) The grammar for accessing properties is not really XML-friendly, which
has led to inventions like "DAV:iscollection". Indeed, this so-called
"synthetic property" only solves one special case and leaves the rest
(lockdiscovery, attributes, deltaV computed properties) untreated. I think
DASL needs a grammar which can do "arbitrary" queries into the attributes,
so something with the power of XPath would need to be used.

In addition, I'm not happy with the language in chapter 3 (discovery of
grammars). It mixes namespace prefixes with URI schemes, which is only
correct in the very special case of "DAV:" (being a URI scheme and also the
prefix used there).

Julian

Received on Tuesday, 12 June 2001 06:13:01 UTC