[uf-rest] Roy Fielding on WebDAV and PROPs

[Elias Sinderson]

Dan Kubb wrote:

> Dr. Prabhakar wrote:
>
>> The interesting question for me is what the "right" way to do  
>> properties would be over HTTP.  I presume it would require some  sort 
>> of convention for a property namespace, which implies non- opaque 
>> URLs.  Which in term (in order to be RESTful) would require  the 
>> *server* to have some way to tell clients about it, since  clients 
>> shouldn't *assume* URI structure. Any thoughts about the optimal way 
>> to do that?
>
> I was thinking that the Link header from RFC 2068 would be a good fit 
> for this.

You may both find the following paper useful in considering these issues 
further:

E. James Whitehead, Jr., Yaron Y. Goland, "The WebDAV Property Design" 
/Software, Practice and Experience/, vol 34, 2004, pp 135-161. 
<http://www.cs.ucsc.edu/~ejw/papers/spe-whitehead.pdf>

Additionally, I've found the following to contain a great deal of 
practical as well as historical insight into decisions that were made 
about the WebDAV data model and related disiderata: 
<http://webdav.org/papers/#misc>


Cheers,
Elias