WEBDAV Working Group
Munich IETF
August 11, 1997
A meeting of the World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and
Versioning (WEBDAV) Working Group was held at the Munich IETF on
August 11, 1997. Jim Whitehead chaired the meeting, and Del
Jensen recorded meeting notes. Over the duration of the meeting
there were 54 attendees. These minutes, the agenda, and slides
presented during the meeting are accessible on the Web at URL
<
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/munich/>.
The meeting began with a review of the agenda, which was accepted
without modification. Following this, Jim Whitehead began a
series of three presentations. The first presentation was a
brief high-level overview of the functionality being considered
by the WEBDAV working group. This included information on the
status of the requirements document, which should have a new
version out by August 27, 1997, the protocol document, which
should have a new draft out by August 29, 1997, and the scenarios
document, on which work has stalled. It is expected that the
requirements document will begin a working group last call after
this next draft has been released. This is the final step before
forwarding this document along to the IESG.
After this presentation, Jim Whitehead gave another presentation
outlining the key design elements of the properties, collections,
and namespace operations aspects of the protocol specification.
Notes on this presentation follow:
1. Properties
a. Definition and structure
b. New methods
2. Collections
a. Definition and structure
Q: Why have internal members? Why are not all members specified
as external (absolute URIs)?
A: The well-defined specification of existing methods on external
members can be problematic across namespace boundaries. Internal
membership is convenient for modeling file system behavior, which
one anticipates to be a common use for collections. Container
models that are more exotic than the simple hierarchical model
are not excluded by the proposed structure for collections.
b. Methods
3. The Source Link
Once the two overview presentations were completed, Jim Whitehead
led a discussion of open issues using slides which listed the
issue, gave pro and con discussion on the issue, and then listed
a recommended resolution to the issue. Discussion on these
issues is summarized below -- for more detail consult the
original slide presentation.
A. Property Instance URL encoding
Problem: Get rid of the DAV switch
Solution: Discovery of Property names
Informal Poll: Adopted
B. Retrieval of Properties
Problem: Search is too complicated for WEBDAV scope
Solution: Simplified set of methods to retrieve property
names and values on a by-resource basis.
Informal Poll: Adopted
C. Property Attributes
Problem: Resource level granularity for property attributes
(e.g., live, readonly) can make schemas
inconsistent
Solution: Raise attribute granularity to schema level.
Informal Poll: Adopted
D. Method Recursive Semantics for Collections
Problem: Agreement on well-defined extension of current
methods is hard to get, and aspects of this
problem are arguably outside the scope of WEBDAV.
Solution: Define only "level 0" behavior.
Informal Poll: Adopted
E. Atomic Locking of Collections
Problem: The current requirements document specifies that
WEBDAV provide this functionality. The protocol
draft may provide only a partial solution.
Solution: None
F. Support for Variants
Problem: The current specification is silent on how to add
or change resource variants.
Solution: None at present, take to list (possibilities:
transparent content negotiation, content-location
header, translation-of/supercedes relationships)
*** Meeting adjourned ***
