Subject: Reminder: WG Last Call on Ordered Collections

From: "Jim Whitehead" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 12:44:13 -0700

Just a brief reminder that we're in the final days of a working group last
call for comments period on the WebDAV Ordered Collections protocol,
draft-ietf-webdav-ordering-protocol-07.

From the abstract of the -07 specification

  This specification extends the WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol
  to support server-side ordering of collection members. Of particular
  interest are orderings that are not based on property values, and so
  cannot be achieved using a search protocol's ordering option and
  cannot be maintained automatically by the server. Protocol elements
  are defined to let clients specify the position in the ordering of
  each collection member, as well as the semantics governing the
  ordering.

This last call for comments period ends Sunday, April 27, 2003, at midnight,
US Pacific time.

The specification can be accessed at:

Text (this is the normative version)
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-webdav-ordering-protocol-07.t
xt

HTML:
http://www.greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-webdav-ordering-protocol-07.
html

XML:
http://www.greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-webdav-ordering-protocol-07.
xml

Based on comments received so far, there will likely be another draft
produced, but there will not be another WG last call period. I am currently
anticipating that the -08 specification will be sent immediately to the IESG
for approval. As a result, if you are planning on reviewing this
specification, please do so immediately.

- Jim

---

From: "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 22:23:17 +0200

Thans Jim,

the current edits are this URL:

http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-webdav-ordering-protocol-latest.
html

There's currently one unresolved issue for which I am looking for feedback:

http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-webdav-ordering-protocol-latest.
html#rfc.issue.6.1-when-are-members-added

In case that there's no additional feedback, the plan is to close it as "no
change".

Regards,

Julian

--
<green/>bytes GmbH -- http://www.greenbytes.de -- tel:+492512807760

---

From: "B. Shadgar" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 16:17:17 +0100

> specification, please do so immediately.

May I ask about practical example or cases about WebDAV Ordered Collections
protocol. It is not clear to me why we define new protocol when we have the
search protocol's ordering option. In other words, which aspects of ordering
can not be covered by the search protocol's ordering option.

Thanks in advance,
Bita

---

From: "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 17:28:45 +0200

> From: [email-masked]
> [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of B. Shadgar
> Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2003 5:17 PM
> To: Jim Whitehead
> Cc: WebDAV
> Subject: Re: Reminder: WG Last Call on Ordered Collections
>
> ...
>

See:
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-webdav-ordering-protocol-latest
.html#rfc.section.2.p.2>

---

From: "B. Shadgar" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 16:44:09 +0100

> <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-webdav-ordering-protocol-latest

Thanks Julian. But can't we use the properties instead. For example in case of
having a book, just define a property called page, or if there is no proper
property, just create a proper one for them. I read the documentation, it is
saying  "The ordering protocol defined here focuses on support for such
human-maintained orderings."  What does it mean by human-maintained ordering?

Sorry if it is very basic question.
Bita.

---

From: "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 18:39:24 +0200

Hi,

some more thoughts:

Properties are attached to resources. Ordering is a property of the
collection that contains internal member names identifying resources. For
instance, you might have several collections containing bindings to the same
set of resources, but with different orderings. There's no way to simulate
this with DASL (which -- by the way -- is not nearly done...) and returning
ordered results.

Julian

> -----Original Message-----
> Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2003 5:44 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Cc: WebDAV

Thanks Julian. But can't we use the properties instead. For example in case
of
having a book, just define a property called page, or if there is no proper
property, just create a proper one for them. I read the documentation, it is
saying  "The ordering protocol defined here focuses on support for such
human-maintained orderings."  What does it mean by human-maintained
ordering?

---

From: "B. Shadgar" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 18:02:12 +0100

> this with DASL (which -- by the way -- is not nearly done...) and returning

Ok, what if we define a live property called resource-name which is
representing the name of a resource?

Bita.

---

From: "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 19:35:48 +0200

> Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2003 7:02 PM
> To: Julian Reschke
> Cc: w3c-dist-auth

We can't, because the name isn't a property of the resource. It's a property
of the binding *to* the resource (of which there can be many), and which
belongs to the state of the parent collection.

BTW: how would that help?

Julian

---

From: "B. Shadgar" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 18:54:59 +0100

> BTW: how would that help?

Well, I was thinking that maybe the best use case of the Ordering protocol was
regarded to the versioning of resources. In this case, I though if every time
that a revision is created, a live property containing the name of resource was

attached to the resource, maybe we didn't need to the new Ordered protocol.

Does it make sense?

Bita.

---

From: "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 20:37:18 +0200

> Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2003 7:55 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Cc: w3c-dist-auth
> ..

Now you got me confused :-) What's the relation of (1) resource names and
(2) versioning to ordering collection members?

Julian

---

From: "B. Shadgar" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 11:00:06 +0100

> (2) versioning to ordering collection members?

Dear Julian

Sorry.  I may be wrong, it is just some thought.
1) the resource names to ordering collection:

By my undrestanding, what is suggested in the ordering collection, is a way
to change the order of resources and put them the at the beginning or end of
the list, after or before a given resource. Also this is true that in the
Real numbers you can always find a number less or a number greater than a
given number.
Consider, you have a live property called resource-name which is made by the
name of resource followed by a Real number. Now every time you would like to
have a new order, system can change the resource- name based on your order
(by changing the Real part of resource-names) . Then by using the order
option on the resource-name in the Search protocol we can have the desired
order.

2) Versioning to ordering collection:

The tree in the section 8 of the orderd-collections-protocol reminds me of
the situation in the Versioning. This reminding and some other thoughts
(maybe silly) caused to say so.

I hope I didn't make you more confused. If so, I apologize again.

Regards,
Bita.

---

From: "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 19:27:12 +0200

> Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2003 12:00 PM
> To: Julian Reschke
> Cc: B. Shadgar; w3c-dist-auth

I understand that you're saying that using a combination of dead properties
and DASL queries, similar results could be obtained. This is true. However,
modelling collection ordering as property of the containing collection has
the following advantages:

- no need to modify resources
- no need to come up with unique property names per containing collection
- no dependendy on an unfinished spec
- existing clients can take immediate advantage by just not sorting a
PROPFIND result
- ...

Hope this helps in understanding the motivation,

Julian

---

From: "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2003 17:05:32 +0200

OK,

now that the WG last call period has ended, let's decide how to proceed.

There was one open issue, for which there was one vote for change (Lisa),
and one vote for no change (Geoff). As acting editor I lean to no-change. If
this is ok for everybody, I'll submit the draft located at

as version 08.

Julian

> [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Julian Reschke
> Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2003 10:23 PM
> To: Jim Whitehead; WebDAV
> Subject: RE: Reminder: WG Last Call on Ordered Collections
>
>
>
> Thans Jim,
>

---

From: "Lisa Dusseault" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2003 12:05:57 -0700

"No change" isn't acceptable when the comment is that something is not
specified.  My last issue was "if a destination is not being
overwritten, then shouldn't the MOVE (the rename) preserve ordering?"

The spec can say "When a resource is moved within a collection and the
destination did not previously exist (the 'rename' case), its relative
ordering MUST be preserved." Or the spec could say SHOULD or MAY.
However, staying silent on an issue like this allows some implementors
to assume MUST and others to assume MAY.

That said, if a sentence like this is added to the draft we do not need
to go through WG last call again for this issue.

Lisa

> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Julian Reschke
> Sent: Monday, April 28, 2003 8:06 AM
> To: WebDAV
http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-webdav-ordering-protocol-lat
est.
html

as version 08.

Julian

---

From: "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2003 23:36:04 +0200

Lisa,

> to assume MUST and others to assume MAY.

if the spec is silent on the issue simply means that it's undefined. So an
implementor that assumes this mean "MUST" simply is wrong. The point being,
we (Geoff and myself) feel that the spec shouldn't require any specific
server behaviour, and thus not defining it at all seems to be absolutely
reasonable.

Julian

> [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Lisa Dusseault
> Sent: Monday, April 28, 2003 9:06 PM
> To: 'Julian Reschke'; 'WebDAV'

---

From: "Lisa Dusseault" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 10:15:03 -0700

Why should the spec be silent when people have reasonable questions
about whether an issue works one way or another?  If no specific
behavior is required, you must still say so.  Otherwise readers *will*
assume.  

Lisa

> From: Julian Reschke [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: Monday, April 28, 2003 2:36 PM
> To: Lisa Dusseault; 'Julian Reschke'; 'WebDAV'

---

From: "Jim Whitehead" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 12:15:50 -0700

Geoff Clemm writes:
> For (3), I don't think making a special case for "move within a
> collection" vs. "move outside of the collection" is worth optimizing,
> since it makes the spec more complicated and is likely to be enough
> of a problem to some servers to make it likely to not be followed anyway.

I'm not sure I understand the objection the Geoff raises (i.e., I don't see
what the potential problems might be).

IMO, the principle of least astonishment applies here. If a resource has a
given name (final path segment) in a collection, and then is given a new
name (final path segment), a user would expect that resource to keep its
current position, unless the ordering explicitly depends on the value of the
final path segment.

So, I'm with Lisa, I think some additional language here would be good (MUST
preserve position for MOVEs that only change final path segment except when
the order semantics explicitly depend on the URL or final path segment).

- Jim

---

From: "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 18:58:05 +0200

> Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2003 7:15 PM

Lisa,

I disagree. It's simply impractical to list all the things a spec doesn't
specify. If it's unspecified, readers MUST NOT assume. That being said, if
the WG thinks that there's a real risk that this particular part may be
misinterpreted, we surely can try to clarify (in case we decide that we want
this to stay server-defined).

Julian