RE: Issue: SOURCE_PROPERTY_UNDERSPECIFIED

Joe,

- the point of a machine-readable link type is that a client may be able to
offer a better user interface if it knows what kind of link this is. For
instance, there might be a special "role" for the XSLT file used for
creating an HTML presentation of an XML file, and certainly it would be good
for client to be able to detect whether one of the sources plays this role.
No, we don't have  to define roles, but it certainly makes sense to have an
optional place where they *may* be reported. XLink reports them using URIs,
and I think so should we.

- you have removed the XLink compatible syntax without, but have stayed with
the href attribute. This makes your format both incompatible with XLink and
the standard DAV:href format (which can be used by RFC3253's expand-property
REPORT). Why did you do this? It doesn't make your format simple to
process -- it just saves a few characters in the XML representation. I think
HREFs should either be reported consistent with other WebDAV standards
(DAV:href, supported by the expand-property REPORT), or compatible with
XLink (which I would personally prefer). Unfortunately, we can't have both
at the same time...

Julian

> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org
> [mailto:w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Joe Orton
> Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2002 12:47 AM
> To: Webdav WG (E-mail)
> Subject: Re: Issue: SOURCE_PROPERTY_UNDERSPECIFIED
>
>
> On Tue, May 14, 2002 at 12:15:24AM +0200, Julian Reschke wrote:
> > I'm happy to have a different format (I've got enough flak promoting
> > XLink-compatible syntax :-). My requirements are
> >
> > - must support multiple links
> > - there must be a machine-readable description for the link type
> > - the should be a human-readable description for the link type
> >
> > Please post what you're using right now -- we'll probably able
> to extend if
> > necessary.
>
> I just dropped the xlink: from the href attribute, and got rid of the
> xlink:role attribute entirely, giving e.g.:
>
> <D:prop>
>  <D:source-set>
>   <D:source href="http://example.com/dav/source.xml">Source</D:source>
>   <D:source href="http://example.com/dav/render.xsl">Stylesheet</D:source>
>   <D:source href="http://example.com/dav/etc.etc"/>
>  </D:source-set>
> </D:prop>
>
> which should satisfy your first and third requirements; I'm not sure
> about "machine-readable" link descriptions being mandatory. My client
> doesn't need to understand anything about the link, I just want it to be
> able to display a menu of "URI: description" choices when there is >1
> source available, so that the user can decide.
>
> (Similarly, the minimum amount of server configuration I'd like to
> require is saying e.g. "/dav/render.xsl is a source of /dav/*.xml")
>
> Regards,
>
> joe
>

Received on Monday, 13 May 2002 19:04:26 UTC