RE: multiple "source" properties documents

My perspective is a bit different.  The DAV:source property
was designed for exactly the situation that Conal describes.
He'd like a generic application to pop up the list of URL's
and say "these are the sources".  There are no significant
testing issues ... the format of the DAV:source property is
well defined, and all a client is expected to do is to expose
the specified list of URL's.

So in Conal's case, I'd just expose this feature using the
DAV:source property, and you are no worse off that if you
just defined your own custom property, and that if enough
folks do so, the property will become "undeprecated".

Note: I am not arguing against deprecating the DAV:source
feature ... I don't think the topic is significant enough
to merit being re-opened ... I'm just saying that if you are
an implementor and encounter a valid use for the DAV:source
property, you should go ahead and use it instead of inventing
your own custom property, even if it is deprecated in 2518bis.

Cheers,
Geoff


Lisa wrote on 09/18/2003 07:41:56 PM:

> 
> 
> > From what I read, the "source" property was a great idea but 
> > no-one ever implemented it, supposedly because it was too 
> > complicated and/or there was no perceived need. 
> 
> I'd characterize the reasons a little differently: 
>  1) The feature was underspecified, there was never enough 
>    information in the spec to be able to fully implement
>    or interoperate
>  2) Implementation interest was low -- we asked around to see
>    who had implemented this feature and got no positive
>    responses at all.
> 
> > Eventually it 
> > was formally deprecated. Is this correct? 
> 
> The deprecation isn't final yet, but we are proposing to 
> deprecate it.
> 
> > I've also read of 
> > the "translate" header, which I gather is a 
> > Microsoft-specific extension? I also gather that this only 
> > supports a one-to-one mapping between a document and its 
> > source, i.e. a document has one and only one source?
> 
> Yes
> 
> > My case is that I have a server which generates pages from 
> > multiple sources and keeps track of those sources in such a 
> > way that it could fairly easily support dav:source. I'd like 
> > editors to be able to edit the page and select which of the 
> > source documents to edit. But are there existing clients that 
> > will actually do that? Or are there other web-dav mechanisms 
> > that might support my use-case?
> 
> Not that I know of.  You'd be the first to implement a 
> protocol feature to expose multiple mappings so nobody
> to interoperate with and no tools to support your feature.
> 
> If there is sufficient interest from implementors to make
> forward progress on this, I'd recommend a separate draft rather
> than resurrect the unimplemented, underspecified, and untested
> feature in RFC2518.
> 
> Lisa
> 
>