RE: JW2a, JW2b: Search Arbiter resource

I'm returning to a post I made on August 16, 1999
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webdav-dasl/1999JulSep/0015.html>,
to see if we can start closing down some of the open issues in DASL.  The
crux of this issue is whether the DASL specification is defining a new type
of resource, the search arbiter.  After some discussion, Yaron and I agreed
that a search arbiter does not necessarily need to be DAV compliant, it just
needs to support the SEARCH method.

I recommended:

> A search arbiter is any resource that supports SEARCH.  A
> search arbiter is not a new resource type.
>
> In general, if a resource is a search arbiter, no conclusions
> can be made concerning what other methods it supports.

Yaron suggested, in his response, that a search arbiter could be a new
resource type, and that DAV resources could have multiple inheritance.  That
is, the DAV:resourcetype property could responde with DAV:searcharbiter, and
potentially some other value as well.  I tend to think that adding in
multiple inheritance is overkill for this situation, especially since there
is no strong need to report DAV:searcharbiter inside DAV:resourcetype (a
client can discover that the resource is a search arbiter by performing an
OPTIONS request).

So my recommendation still stands: a search arbiter should just be any
resource that supports SEARCH, and it is not a new resource type.

- Jim

Received on Wednesday, 19 April 2000 16:53:27 UTC