relProperty Re: [uf-rest] Roy Fielding on WebDAV and PROPs

[Matt Garland]

You might find some of Hans Reiser's research on namespaces useful in
this effort: http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html.

On 5/6/06, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar <drernie at opendarwin.org> wrote:
> Hi Breton,
>
> On May 5, 2006, at 6:01 PM, Breton Slivka wrote:
> > On May 5, 2006, at 5:46 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
> >> http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/property#relProperty
> >>>
> >>> Are you talking about listing each property seperately in their
> >>> own link statement? Or a link to a file describing the URI schema
> >>> in use for the properties of that page?
> >>
> >> The former, I think; otherwise, it becomes difficult to "identify
> >> each individually update-able resource with its own URI."
> >> Clarified at: http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/property#
> >>
> >
> > The reason I ask is this then sounds suspiciously like the meta tag
> > with some server updating code tacked on.
>
> Ah, here's the difference.  "relProperty"  is a *pointer* to a value,
> which lives in a different resource.  The meta tag is an "immediate"
> variable (if I have my terms right): the value is embedded within the
> document, and thus can't be updated independently.  This harkens back
> to our extrinsic vs. intrinsic metadata issue.
>
> I've tried to make that clearer at: http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/
> property#relProperty
>
> >> I'm not clear why ";" creates hierarchy problems?  My gut-level
> >> interpretation would be:
> >>
> >>      ;prop1;prop2 are chained properties
> >>      ;prop1/subprop1 is a "hierarchical" property
> >>
> >> That is, we just reuse the existing HTML hierarchy separator.
> >> What would be the problem with that?
> >
> > Ambiguity
> >
> > http://example.org/test/books;citation/author=Breton;title=example
> >
> > is author a subproperty of citation, or a  subdirectory of books?
> > Is title a child of citation, or a child of books?
>
> I think we may be talking past each other. I fully agree that just
> saying "; is a separator" is ambiguous.  That is *why* this is an
> open issue -- we need to fully specify exactly how those corner cases
> need to be handled.  To be sure, that is a lot of work -- but
> (assuming we accept the need for hierarchical properties) *that* work
> has to be done, regardless of the encoding used.
>
> Rather than argue in the abstract, let me suggest some _possible_
> rules for how chaining and hierarchies could work:
>
> http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/property#.3Bproperty
>
> I'm not happy with them, but its just a starting point -- alternate
> suggestions are welcome! Again, if you think about this as replacing
> WebDAV, not "meta" tags, the usage scenarios might make more sense.
> Any thoughts about how to make that distinction clearer would be
> greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks for the feedback!
>
> -- Ernie P.
>
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