Subject: RE: New RFC2518bis draft

From: "Clemm, Geoff" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2002 20:00:51 -0400

From: Julian Reschke [mailto:[email-masked]]

   > From:  Lisa Dusseault
   >
   > The proposed text in 2518 bis does deprecate allprop as well as
redefine
   > it to a certain extent. If 'allprop' is redefined, without being
renamed
   > or deprecated, it will cause confusion for new implementors.  Here are
   > some of the options:
   >  1) Deprecate.
   >  2) Redefine and leave in place.  Disadvantage: confusion to new
   > implementers who will be misled by the apparent meaning of 'allprop'
   > into misunderstanding what it does.

   Advantage: this is the current situation with RFC3253 and the ACL
   spec, and this doesn't seem to cause any confusion at all. All we
   need is to clarify RFC2518.

   I agree that the name "allprop" will be a bit confusing. But that's
   something that can be solved by properly explaining it, right?

I agree.  I have little concern over any confusion resulting from the
name "DAV:allprop".  The concept of "all dead properties plus 2518
defined properties" is very simple, and should be easy to convey.  And
even if an implementor gets it wrong and returns some (or all)
non-2518 live properties as well, little or no harm is done.

   >  3) Rename and redefine (e.g. 'deadprop', defined to return all
   > the dead properties).  Disadvantage: servers that were previously
   > compliant with 2518 will not be compliant with 2518bis.

I think this disadvantage significantly outweighs the minor benefits
of a slightly better name for this concept.

   > No functionality is lost by deprecating allprop - clients can always
use
   > the 'propname' request to find all the dead and live property names,
and
   > select among those.

   Yes, but at greatly increased cost, both in number of roundtrips, client
   complexity and computation time in the server. I've explained this in
   <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/2002JanMar/0186.html>:

I agree that it is valuable to have a simple mechanism for retrieving
all dead properties in one request (especially for a non-zero Depth
PROPFIND), and I agree that using DAV:allprop is the most interoperable
mechanism for providing this mechanism.

Cheers,
Geoff

---

From: Dan Brotsky <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 09:43:40 -0700

Just for clarity, given the timing of various responses: I'm squarely 
with Geoff and Julian on this one: we should redefine (well, clarify) 
DAV:ALLPROP as Julian suggests and not do any deprecation.

     dan