RE: RFC2518 (WebDAV) / RFC2396 (URI) inconsistency

Wow, that's annoying!

It seems to me that fixing RFC2396 to allow an empty opaque_part would be
best, unless someone can recall any rationale for disallowing it in the
first place.  It looks quite arbitrary.

Note that even if IETF changed the DAV namespace, you still couldn't write a
meaningful schema for WebDAV, because schema languages don't recognize the
odd naming convention that RFC2518 adopts in 23.4.2 (Meaning of Qualified
Names).

If anything is going to be done to change the basic XML structure of WebDAV,
it would be a good time to fix 23.4.2 as well.

What I really _don't_ want to see is everyone doing <dp:ropertyupdate
xmlns:dp="DAV:p"> to get conformance to all 3 specs.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org
> [mailto:w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Julian Reschke
> Sent: Monday, November 19, 2001 4:33 PM
> To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> Subject: RFC2518 (WebDAV) / RFC2396 (URI) inconsistency
>
>
> (copy of post to <mailto:uri@w3.org>).
>
> Hi.
>
> (1) RFC2518 (WebDAV) is based on XML + namespaces and has
> chosen to use the
> namespace name "DAV:" to identify it's elements. Note that
> "DAV:" *is* a
> properly registered URI scheme (see [1])
>
> (2) The XML namespaces recommendation says that an XML namespace is
> identified by a URI reference as defined in RFC2396.
>
> (3) RFC2396 gives the following grammar for absolute URIs:
>
> absoluteURI   = scheme ":" ( hier_part | opaque_part )
> opaque_part   = uric_no_slash *uric
>
> "DAV:" doesn't seem to be a valid "opaque_part", because
> "opaque_part" MUST
> start with "uric_no_slash", thus it may not be empty.
>
> (4) I became aware of this mismatch when trying to develop a
> RELAG NG schema
> for WebDAV. James Clark's JING validator rejects the
> namespace name "DAV:"
> as invalid URI. So this has become a real-world problem
> (maybe it was "just"
> academic before).
>
> I think this means that either RFC2396 or RFC2518 need to be fixed.
>
> Feedback appreciated.
>
> Julian
>
>
> [1] <http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes>
>

Received on Monday, 19 November 2001 19:18:26 UTC