FW: RE: Future direction for DASL/WebDAV SEARCH

Accidentally caught by the spam filter.

- Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Wiggen [mailto:kwiggen@xythos.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 7:39 PM
To: Jim Whitehead; WebDAV; www-webdav-dasl@w3.org
Subject: [Moderator Action] RE: Future direction for DASL/WebDAV SEARCH






I agree with Jim that the current implementation is very useful in its
current form.  Although there are holes, it is very useful in many
circumstances.  

Given the lack of work going on with this specification, I do not
believe it useful to put some of the "nice to haves" into the
specification now.  There are a number of production systems being used
today without extra features and I believe we should get the work that
is done issued.

I believe we should make this a Proposed standard.

Julian recently wrote that the remaining issues are marshaling and data
typing.

Let's go through the marshaling on this list quickly and get consensus
on those issues.  

Data Typing.  If the Webdav WG can't get a consensus on this topic in
all these years, I don't think DASL should be held up on it.  In the
last week I have only seen Julian answer this email, so I don't think a
lot of people will work on the data typing just to get DASL done.  Let's
simply get what work has been done into an RFC.

I believe a NEW WG can be made to improve on DASL and bring together web
searching, XPath, data typing etc. for not only Webdav resources but
others as well (can you say web service for Google, Verity, etc).

Kevin Wiggen
Xythos Software Inc.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Whitehead [mailto:ejw@cse.ucsc.edu] 
Sent: Monday, September 29, 2003 2:00 PM
To: WebDAV; www-webdav-dasl@w3.org
Subject: Future direction for DASL/WebDAV SEARCH


All,

I'm interested in people's thoughts on how to proceed with the DASL
specification.

The DASL protocol, in its current form, has a great deal of effort and
maturity. Its well-specified enough such that there are multiple
interoperating implementations. Though it has limitations, it is very
useful
in its current form. This argues for issuing the current specification
as an
RFC, either standards track or experimental.

On the other hand, there are many features that would be nice to have
added.
Some imply significant changes, as with proper sort ordering and
comparator
evaluation of dead properties which implies adding a type system to
WebDAV
properties. As well, handling XML querying intelligently would be a
plus,
but would also require much work. This argues for creating a new working
group to address further development of DASL. It might make sense to
involve
a wider audience, perhaps by including people in the W3C community
interested in protocols for XML searching.

So, there are a couple of choices:

a) Do we issue current specification more-or-less as-is?
   i) as Proposed
   ii) as Experimental
b) Do we continue development of the specification?
   i) within WebDAV community only
     - as new WG? in DAV WG?
   ii) expand community to address Web/XML searching in general, not
necessarily focused on WebdAV
     - as IETF WG? as W3C activity?

There are probably other choices as well.

Let me know what your thoughts are.

Thanks!

- Jim

Received on Friday, 3 October 2003 18:46:16 UTC