RE: RFC2518 bis, attributes on property names -- in or out?

> From: w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org
> [mailto:w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Lisa Dusseault
> Sent: Thursday, November 28, 2002 3:38 AM
> To: Webdav WG
> Subject: RFC2518 bis, attributes on property names -- in or out?
>
>
>
>
> I heard from at least one implementor (Joel Soderberg) that random
> attributes on property names should not be stored "as part of" the
> property.  This makes it more complicated to marshall the property again
> when responding to a PROPFIND request.  Attribute namespaces may be
> difficult here. What namespace are the attributes in?  What if the

I don't understand that part of the question. The namespace of an attribute
is defined by the "Namespaces in XML" recommendation. There's no ambiguity
here.

> attribute on the property name is a namespace declaration -- does that
> have to be preserved *in that location*?

Back last year, I wrote down a precise definition of what I think needs to
be persisted. This is not part of it.

> Another consideration is that we may want to reserve attributes on the
> property name for meta-information *about* the property (like data
> types).  That kind of information isn't part of the *value* of the
> property, but it may be used to figure out how to treat the property now
> or later.  An implementation could safely ignore attributes it didn't
> understand.

This is a no-brainer. Attributes can be put into namespaces to disambiguate
them. The specific case of putting type information into attributes is
discussed in [1], which is compatible with the requirement to persist
attributes.

> RFC2518 says "Language tagging information in the property's value (in
> the "xml:lang" attribute, if present) MUST be persistently stored along
> with the property, and MUST be subsequently retrievable using PROPFIND."
> I believe the spec is silent about other attributes.

The spec is silent about what the value of a property actually is. So this
needs to be resolved (issues list [2], issue "PROP_ROUNDTRIP").

> In RFC2518bis, we got more specific about what makes up the value of a
> property:
>    "The value of a property consists of attributes on the property name
>    element, language attributes which are scoped to the property,
>    namespaces which are used in the property name element or its
>    children, and child elements including text.  The server MUST
>    persistently store this information and reconstruct it in PROPFIND
>    responses.   "
>
> Now that objections have been raised, who feels strongly for one side or
> another?

I feel strongly for keeping it this way, although I'd prefer wording that
uses the more precise terminology from the XML Infoset
recommendation.PROP_ROUNDTRIP. In particular I'd prefer to delay any change
until the issues above have been dicussed.

Julian

[1]
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-webdav-property-datatypes-la
test.html>
[2] <http://www.webdav.org/wg/rfcdev/issues.htm>

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Received on Thursday, 28 November 2002 04:11:32 UTC