Subject: Issues/questions about the bindings protocol specification...

From: Peter Raymond <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 11:40:32 -0000

Hi,

A group of people here at MERANT have recently completed reading/reviewing 
the bindings protocol document.  We recorded some issues/questions about the
specification.

I understand that this document has completed a final call period, but does 
anyone know the status of the document, there are open issues etc, is there 
a timeframe for it becoming a "proposed standard"?  Is anyone actively 
editing or revising the document?

Here are the questions/issues we had with the specification:

1) Section 9 says that methods MUST produce the same results when submitted
   on different bindings to the same resource.  I disagree, if you issue a
   PROPFIND request on /coll1/bar the href returned would be /coll1/bar,
   if you issue the same PROPFIND request on /coll2/bar (which is bound to
   the same resource) the href returned would be /coll2/bar.  The responses
   would not be the same.  I am sure there could be other examples of this.

2) We found the definition of the DAV:bindings property in section 13.1
   very confusing.  It would be good to show an example of this property,
   an interesting example would be the DAV:bindings on resource R2 from
   Figure 1.  I will send a separate e-mail on this issue.

3) Section 15 describes capability discovery and shows the use of a header
   called Public.  I cannot find a definition of this header in RFC2518 or
   RFC2616 (there is a Cache-Control public directive but no Public header).
   In what specification is this header defined?  Maybe I just missed it.

4) Also on the subject of section 15, it seems we have many ways of finding
   out what capabilities a server or a resource has...Allow header, Public
   header, DAV header, DAV:supported-method-set property (in DeltaV).
   I find this confusing, and I know in the various WebDAV groups there has
   been some discussion of these and the differences between them, I think
   they should be defined clearly and consistently in all the WebDAV related

   specifications.
   
5) Section 18 there is a missing space in the last sentence (after the 507 
   code).

6) Is there anyone looking at how bindings affect the other protocols,
   for example have we looked at how DeltaV features (like Baseline
   etc) are affected by bindings?

BTW...are there any server vendors out there that implement or are thinking
of implementing the BIND method?  Similarly are any clients using it?

Regards,
--
Peter Raymond - MERANT
Principal Architect (PVCS)
Tel: +44 (0)1727 813362
Fax: +44 (0)1727 869804
mailto:[email-masked]
WWW: http://www.merant.com