Subject: IETF WebDAV WG meeting -- current status of greenbytes activities

From: "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 00:35:31 +0100

Hi,

1) Internet Draft "Datatypes for WebDAV properties" [1]

Initially, this only covered marshalling of type information for WebDAV
properties. It builds on the datatype part of XML schema (not the structure
part), and is compatible to what other XML vocabularies do (for instance,
SOAP). It's also very similar to the type system in Microsoft IIS, Exhange
and Sharepoint -- the main difference being that it's based on W3C
recommendations.

This part of the draft has been stable since almost a year, and support has
been present in shipping SAP Enterpise Portal servers for several months
now.

Recently, we have started to extend the draft to marshall information that
should make it possible for generic clients to treat a resource's properties
in a more meaningful way. It includes

- flags ("hidden" and "protected") -- this is already in the draft, and
- display names (language dependant).

This has been published as I-D in October, and hopefully Eric Sedlar will be
able to give a summary during the WG meeting.

2) Internet Draft "Computing the CHECKIN URI in WebDAV versioning" [2]

This has been stable for several months now and is implemented in shipping
SAP Enterprise Portal servers. From the abstract:

"In many cases, a versioning-aware client might want to display/include the
URI of the version it's editing while it's being edited. For instance, an
editor might include this as meta information, or the author of a document
might want to know the URI of the version before it's checked in. A
well-known example is the W3C way of referring to document versions in
recommendations: it contains references to "the current version", to "this
version" and to the "previous version". Something like this is currently
impossible with WebDAV versioning [RFC3253], as the version URI is
determined at the time of CHECKIN."

We will probably submit it for publication as Informational RFC soon, unless
other WG members file like participating in this activity.

3) Internet Draft "Including additional properties in WebDAV
PROPFIND/allprop requests" [3]

Again, this has been stable for several months now and is implemented in
shipping SAP Enterprise Portal servers. From the abstract:

"Recent specifications extending the Web Distributed Authoring Protocol
(WebDAV) restrict the set of properties returned automatically upon a
PROPFIND/allprop request. This specification defines a method to add
specific properties to the set of properties returned upon
PROPFIND/allprop."

The current draft has been submitted to the RFC editor for publication as
Informational RFC in September. It's now up to the WG to decide whether this
should be transformed into a WG activity (leading to inclusion into
RFC2518bis or to publication as separate Working Group draft), or whether it
can be published as informational (and private) RFC. Hopefully, Geoff will
be able to say a few words about this during the WG meeting.

4) WebDAV SEARCH [4]

This draft is very slowly progressing and is fully supported in the current
SAP Enterprise Portal version. The main open issues are:

- whether or not the section describing the SEARCH method in general should
be rewritten to specify RFC3253-like error response marshalling (needs
editorial time and commitment from current implementors to change/upgrade
implementations) and

- cleanup of DAV:basicsearch, mainly to properly define valid lexical value
spaces, and how datatypes relate to the various operators (such as: string
collations and so on)

At this point, the main reason for the slow progress is the lack of feedback
on the mailing list.

5) WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol [5]

We feel that this protocol is stable, and we have volunteered in March to
resubmit it after clean up. We still plan to reformat the draft to use
RFC3253-based error marshalling.

6) WebDAV Redirect Reference Resources [6]

We have implemented this draft, and are *very* interested in getting better
client support for it.  At a minimum, clients should be able to correctly
process a server's 302 response (for instance, the basic MS webfolder client
doesn't on PROPFIND, but the newer versions shipping with Sharepoint and
Office XP do). Our plan is to update the old Internet Draft as soon as we're
done with [5].

Julian

[1]
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-webdav-property-datatypes-la
test.html>
[2]
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-deltav-compute-checkin-uri-l
atest.html>
[3]
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-webdav-allprop-include-lates
t.html>
[4]
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-webdav-search-latest.html>
[5]
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-webdav-ordering-protocol-latest
.html>
[6]
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-webdav-redirectref-protocol-02.
html>

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