[uf-rest] Roy Fielding on WebDAV and PROPs

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

Hi Breton,

On Apr 11, 2006, at 10:14 PM, Breton Slivka wrote:
> All I propose to be a "standard" (better word would be convention)

Yes, please;  "convention" is much more microformatty. :-)

> is the name of the property which would contain a list of  
> properties. This is not too extreme I think. That way instead of  
> PROPFIND being a method which prevents resources from having URI's,  
> it becomes a resource with its own URI.
>
> So   GET http://server/object;proplist  becomes its replacement.
>
> does that make sense?

I think the real question is *how* do you indicate that the server  
supports that convention.  To Mark's point, we can NOT unilaterally  
dictate that ";" always means "properties."  However, we *can* say  
that IF the server provides such-and-such notification, THEN the  
client knows that it can provides properties using such-and-such format.

For example, I might propose something like:

<link rel="property" href=";my_property">

(apologies if that's the wrong syntax)

That way, each page can explicitly state which properties exist  
relative to that page, in way that makes it trivial to construct the  
appropriate URI.  A server could (optionally) implement this using  
the "Link:" header, to specify common properties across and entire site.

Make sense?

-- Ernie P.