RFC2518 issue: DAV:href format

See <http://www.greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2518.html#ELEMENT_href>.

RFC2518 says that the contents of DAV:href is a URI as defined by RFC2068
(which should be updated to refer to RFC2396).

The spec seems to be consistent with this (all examples include protocol and
authority).

However, Apache moddav only returns relative URI references (protocol and
authority are missing), so technically doesn't return URIs at all. Microsoft
IIS returns correct URIs. All clients seem to be happy with both.

So,

1) either Apache moddav should be fixed, or
2) RFC2518 should allow relative URI references.

*If* we go with 2), the spec will have to define which base URI needs to be
used to resolve the URI reference to a full URI (the request URI comes to
mind). Note that this would allow new kinds of PROPFIND responses that
*will* not interoperate with many clients:

PROPFIND /foo/bar
Depth: 1

..

<multistatus>
  <reponse>
    <href/>
    ...
  </response>
  <response>
    <href>child-of-bar</href>
    ..
  </response>
</multistatus>


(This could be avoided by saying that the base URI *always* is
"<protocol>://<host>:<port>/").

Received on Thursday, 28 February 2002 09:39:50 UTC