REPORT vs SEARCH

Hi,

due to the recent discussion on the ACL list, I have done a comparison of
PROPFIND, (ACL/deltaV) REPORT and (DASL) SEARCH. My conclusions are:

- There are three methods with partly overlapping features: PROPFIND
(defined in RFC2518), REPORT (defined in the soon-to-appear deltaV RFC) and
SEARCH (expired draft).
REPORT and SEARCH seem to be almost identical in features -- both just
define frameworks into which query/report grammars can be plugged in.
- There doesn't seem to be anything in the DASL framework that couldn't be
done with REPORT. In fact, query grammar (REPORT) discovery seems to have a
more elegant solution.

Proposal: drop work on DASL. Instead define an (extensible) equivalent of
DAV:basicseach, with the following additional features:

- discovery of searchable properties
- discovery of supported constructs in the grammar
- better signaling of execution errors (non-searchable properties, not
recognized grammar constructs)
- definition of a mandatory subset of query grammar features

Publish this as separate RFC, or possibly move it into RFC2518++.

(the actual tabular comparison is attached as HTML).

Julian