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 . 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 ***