On the life and death

At 12:51 PM 7/21/98 PDT, Babich, Alan wrote:

Your summary is pretty accurate I think.  It does raise some subtle points
about what it means to be alive, and I have sent these to the WebDAV
mailing list in the hopes of getting some clarification on them.  

The only thing I would add is that, on the wire, a property value is, in
general,  ANY, and that's all we know for the general case.

It may contain XML elements or it may contain only PCDATA.  When it gets to
the server, the server may or may not parse the value, and may store it in
any way it pleases. WebDAV doesn't say whether any parsing, no matter how
trivial, makes a property live, nor does it say whether errors, if any,
arising from such parsing MUST be reported to the client.

To elaborate:

<prop><x:age>15</x:age></prop> may be stored as a one byte integer, a two
byte string, a four byte (unicode) string.. DAV does not say.  Likewise 
<prop><x:age><y:roman>xv</y:roman></x:age></prop> may be stored as a one
byte integer, a 21 byte string, etc.

Nor does DAV prohibit x:age from being stored as in integer on some
resources, a complex number on others, and a string on still others.

Someday, there may be means to express tighter constraints on property
values, but not yet.

That's the property model DASL must support.

Received on Wednesday, 22 July 1998 01:01:03 UTC