new issue: DAV:displayname

Hi,

looking at our recent discussion, I feel that we clearly have a problem with
the usage of DAV:displayname.

The current situation seems to be:

1) Some servers implement DAV:displayname as protected live property that
just reflects the last name segment of the request URI (Microsoft IIS)

2) Other servers implement DAV:displayname as dead property that by default
is not set until it get's explicitly set by a client (Apache moddav)


We are currently discussing whether 1) is ok. My position is that it's
clearly not, as

- the value of the last path segment is not "a description of the resource
that is suitable for presentation to a user",

- replicating something that's already available from the <href> element of
the PROPFIND response into a property just has no benefit at all,

- clients demonstratibly can cope with absent DAV:displayname values (as
they all interoperate with Apache moddav today) and finally

- the concept of a property that varies with the request URI is deeply
incompatible with the concept of multiple bindings to resources.


So my preference would be just to state that DAV:displayname SHOULD NOT be
used to replicate the information from the last path segment.

Another alternative would be to *deprecate* DAV:displayname and to define a
new property with more precisely defined semantics, such as DAV:description.


Note that this in fact *is* a interoperability issues, as we are getting
lots of complaints from users not being able to set display names on some
remote WebDAV servers mounted into the SAP Enterprise Portal.


Julian

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

Received on Sunday, 17 August 2003 07:04:20 UTC