property registry, was: Notes for Sept 9 WG meeting (by Dennis Hamilton) - HTML Available

Hi,

I see that there's a lot of activity around property registration. However,
I'm not convinced that we really need that. Let me explain why.

What's the purpose of a property registration? I can think of

1) Avoiding name collisions and

2) Providing additional information about existing properties.

Re 1): this problem doesn't need a new solution. Properties are identified
by a qualified XML name (so the combination of namespace name and local
name). People defining new properties should use a namespace they control,
and if they do that properly, there's no reason to expect name collisions.

Re 2): as for documentation purposes, this is already partly solved by the
XML namespace mechanism. Simply choose one where it's easy to supply
authorative information, such as a HTTP URL or a name of an RFC
("urn:ietf:rfc:nnnn"). As for automatic discovery of machine-readable
property definitions, this definitively needs a lot of additional work.

PS re 2): we currently use the DAV: namespace to identify properties, ACL
privileges, error conditions, REPORT names and DASL search grammars (more?).
However, there's no proper definition of the DAV: URI scheme (stating
purpose, structure and possibly names that are in use). I think what we
really should do is issue a separate document that collects the name
definitions from the various WebDAV specs.


Julian



> [mailto:w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Dennis E. Hamilton
> Sent: Sunday, September 15, 2002 10:43 PM
> To: Webdav WG
> Subject: RE: Notes for Sept 9 WG meeting (by Dennis Hamilton) - HTML
> Available
>
>
>
> The HTML version of these notes is at
>
> 	http://DMware.info/WebDAV/2002-09-09-WebDAV.htm
>
> It is identical except the shortcuts work and I added Ilya's full name in
> the action items.


--
<green/>bytes GmbH -- http://www.greenbytes.de -- tel:+492512807760

Received on Wednesday, 18 September 2002 13:27:27 UTC