Re: Properties of bindings (was Re: Issues remaining with Bind draft)

Lisa Dusseault wrote:

> I found a reference to the "parentname" property, defined for Exchange  
> 2000 and Exchange 2003 in the "DAV:" namespace (no big surprise there  
> though it's unfortunate):
> 
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wss/ 
> wss/_cdo_schema_dav.asp

I fail to see the issue. It only means that when Microsoft decides to 
support the BIND draft, they'll have to re-think that design decision. 
Just because somebody in the past did a poor system design that is 
inherently incompatible with having multiple URIs for the same resource 
shouldn't prevent *us* from doing things right.

> The "hidden" flag you suggest would also be interesting as a binding  
> property, as was suggested in this Internet-Draft (also implemented in  
> Microsoft servers):
> 
> http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/props/draft-hopmann-collection- 
> props-00.txt
> 
> As you say, it could also be implemented on the parent collection as a  
> list of hidden bindings within the collection, but the cat's out of the  
> bag there for at least some implementations.  I don't see the harm in  
> allowing some custom live properties to vary on bindings. Any  
> implementation that didn't have the ability to calculate a live  
> property based on a binding wouldn't have to do so.

The harm is that it's incompatible with the stated purpose of the spec 
-- specifying additional URIs to the *same* resource. Of course we can't 
prevent anybody from doing that, but it's against the stated purpose of 
the spec, and thus the spec shouldn't do anything which would encourage 
this kind of design.

BTW: the "hidden" flag in NTFS in fact is kept as part of the file 
resource, not of the binding. Thus, IIS in fact does the right thing in 
presenting this as property on the resource (well, they shouldn't have 
uses the DAV: namespace...).

To test that: create a file, create a second binding to that file 
(cygwin ln), show properties in Explorer for first binding, set 
"hidden", refresh window multiple times. See?


Regards, Julian


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Received on Thursday, 25 March 2004 18:05:37 UTC