Subject: Relative URIs in DAV:reftarget

From: Joe Orton <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 21:48:16 +0000

Section 9 of redirectref-02 talks about resolving relative URI's in
DAV:reftarget.

It talks about resolving them in the context of a MKRESOURCE request, and
gives an example of this, but I'm not sure why. This implies to me that
when a client submits a MKRESOURCE with a relative URI, the server will
resolve that URI immediately and store it in DAV:reftarget as an absolute
URI?

Of course, if you MOVE the reference resource, this is an important issue:
does the reftarget still point to the same place as before (if it was
resolved at the time of MKRESOURCE), or is it now used relative to the new
URI of the RR?

IMO the latter behaviour is strongly desired: if you have a deep
collection heirarchy with some relative cross-referencing amongst the
leaves of the tree, you want them to still work if you rename a top-level
collection. Unix symlinks are like this if you want some precedence. (I'm
not sure, but I don't think you can store relative targets in Windows
"shortcuts"?)

I think the most important point about relative URIs in DAV:reftarget is
that they must be resolved by the server when it returns the Location
header in a 302 response, since this must be absolute. Other than that,
the value of this property should be pretty opaque to the server, just
like any other dead property?

joe