use of boolean literals

The draft in secton 8.7.5 uses lowercase t and f as representations for
boolean values.  I don't like these much.  What would be better?

First I ask, does any other HTTP protocol already define a string
representation for boolean values, e.g. I recall seeing upper case T and F
in DAV, but I think it's gone now.  If there is already a precedent we
should follow it.

Actually I think it likely that we will need to define a tag that
represents the "unknown" value (so that we can construct searches for
properties with unknown values), we may as well define tags for True and
False, too.  In that case we should be these tags in 8.7.5 as well.  But
see also my note about the casesensitive tag.

I realize that, conceptually, one could distinguish between boolean values
in the context of a search filter expression, and boolean values that are
just controlling options such as case sensitivity, but it's not clear to me
that making this distintinction wouldn't add confusion to the spec, as in
"why is 'true' written as 'T' here and as '<DAV:TRUE/>' there?"

Received on Thursday, 16 April 1998 13:43:01 UTC