JW22: datatypes

Jim Whitehead wrote:

"The types in 5.19.3 are underspecified.  Some areas which need
  improvement:
  - It needs to be made explicit that these types will appear as XML
    elements, and every XML element should have a DTD entry for it in
    the spec.
  - There should be a BNF description for each data type.  This is
    especially necessary for the float and datetime types.
  - A string should probably be a triple of contents, character set
    encoding, and natural language (hmm, well perhaps the character
    set encoding doesn't have to be listed here, but natural language
    should be present.)"

First:
It is explicitly stated that the data types appear as XML elements.
The DTD is:
    <!ELEMENT datatype  ANY >

Second:
I disagree that there should be a BNF for each data type,
especially for datetime. I have seen other specs. that point
out that a BNF for datetimes is really messy, and was
therefore left out of the spec. It is not really up to
DASL to define these formats anyway. They should be defined
in some other spec. somewhere.

Third:
Specification of the natural language for properties
(DAV:propdesc) and string literals is only necessary if
more than one is involved. If the repository is all in
the language you wanted and got by content negotiation,
we don't want to mess up the syntax with anything
additional. However, for the case where the repository
has documents in multiple languages, maybe it would
be a good idea for propdesc to return the natural language
for string properties along with the other information.
As far as specifying the natural language the string
literals were composed in, that would provide another
error check. Or, we could just assume we know what it
is from the natural language of the property involved.
If we want to specify it for string literals, it 
obviously should be added to the attribute list for 
literals.

Alan Babich

Received on Thursday, 24 June 1999 20:04:59 UTC