XPointer in href element

I'm trying to sort out how one might use an XPointer in an href within a
PROPFIND response element.

One thing concerns me.

Suppose I have two XPointers, both to the same resource, but to different
locations within it.  This might happen, for example, in a  DASL search
over a set of  WebDAV resources that included XML (or XHTML) resources.  It
could certainly happen that there was more than one location in a given
resource matching the query, and it's quite likely that application writers
would want the full XPointer of the matching location, not just the href of
the resource.

But RFC 2518, section 12.9.1 says (of the response XML element)

A particular href MUST NOT appear more than once as the child of a response
XML element under a multistatus XML element.

So the question is, are two XPointers that point to the same base resource
the *same* href, for the purposes of section 12.9.1?  More generally, are
two URLs that differ only in the fragment considered the same?

If so, then how to support the kind of searching I described above?

Seems like there are two possibilities

1) Remove the restriction in 12.9.1

2) Require such searches to  return the base URL in the href, just once,
and the set of matching Xpointer fragments in element within it, e.g.
something like

<D:response>
  <D:href>http://stars.com/movies.xml</D:href>
  <D:propstat>
    <D:prop>
      <D:matchinglocations>
         <D:xpointer>CHILD(1,H2)</D:xpointer>
         <D:xpointer>CHILD(4,H2)</D:xpointer>
       </D:matchinglocations>
     <X:title>Life of Brian</X:title>
    </D:prop>
  </D:propstat>
 </D:response>


I'd rather not try to change RFC 2518, so does anyone see a problem doing
it this way?

Received on Monday, 17 May 1999 20:17:00 UTC