RE: REPORT vs SEARCH

> From: w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org
> [mailto:w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Lisa Dusseault
> Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2001 4:04 AM
> To: Webdav WG
> Subject: REPORT vs SEARCH
>
>
>
> Jim's argument that DASL could be implemented on top of an existing Web
> Server, without any DAV features, I find compelling.  In
> addition, I thought
> of a few other reasons:
>
>  - DASL is rather big, and rather 'primary'.  It's not just a part of
> another feature, like the reports are part of ACL and part of DeltaV.  As
> such, I believe servers will want to advertise support for search directly
> in the OPTIONS response.  If Search is just another report, it would seem
> wierd to treat it differently.

Well, I wouldn't *want* to treat it differently.

>  - REPORT could become too much of a catch-all.  It shouldn't be.  We need
> to resist making REPORT the POST of DAV.

:-) So instead we're doing this with SEARCH?

I understand Jim's argument about SEARCH being independant of other WebDAV
features. I just fail to see why we couldn't use REPORT's framework which
already does what we need fopr XML-based query grammars.

SEARCH currently doesn't say anything specific about non-XML based query
grammars. It would be trivial to do the same with REPORT.

>  - It's already implemented as SEARCH in a couple places (including, I
> admit, Xythos' implementation).  While I don't consider that argument to
> trump the issue, it's certainly a consideration.  If there were real
> problems with a separate method with SEARCH I'd agree and push to change
> existing implementations -- but there aren't any problems.

However, everybody who *did* implement SEARCH and DAV:basicsearch should
keep in mind that

- drafts are work-in-progress and
- that DASL will need to be fixed in some areas, so I don't think that a
finalized draft can be completely compatible to the one that's published.

> Overall, since the arguments for replacing SEARCH with REPORT aren't very
> strong arguments, I'd say keep it the way it is.

In my opinion, DASL's way to do grammar discovery is broken (it reports
grammars as URIs, while they are really Qualified (XML) names). So this
needs to be replaced with something else anyway. The framework used for
REPORT doesn't have this problem, so why not use it?

Received on Sunday, 7 October 2001 12:29:32 UTC