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Re: URI constraints


Greg Stein wrote:
On Mon, Oct 11, 2004 at 02:51:18PM -0400, Robert Sayre wrote:

Why can't we define the response to a GET on the collection resource? 


While WebDAV avoids defining a response for *generic* collection
resources, there is a "typical" response: the HTML index that you noted.
Subversion servers hosted thru Apache have a built-in HTML or XML
response, and most mod_dav installations use Apache's builtin directory
index for the files in the directory.

That said, this WG could define the GET response for that *specific* type
of collection resource. (maybe this is what you meant?)


Yes, that's what I meant. I think the odds of the WG agreeing to a resource that doesn't respond to GET are extremely low, and I count myself as someone who favors having a defined GET response. Going further, I think all or most of the basic publishing tasks (covered in metaWeblog/blogger APIs) should be available through GET/POST/PUT/DELETE, though that approach may require more requests.

What's stopping you from having child collections? But yes, in general, we have a query problem. 


Child collections would be possible, sure, but would the client know they
were supposed to recurse into them?


If the client is looking for something specific, child collections don't help. If the client is acting on behalf of a user who's just browsing around, they would be handy, since users often like to browse around using a method other than sequences.

Joe alludes to predefined groupings[0] in another email... which in WebDAV terms would be collections that group resources which only refer to back the source resources:

  <group title="Ordered By Date">
       <more href="http://wfw.org/news/2003/01";;>Jan 2003</more>
        ...
  </group>

In DAV terms, I guess it would be pretty much the same, except that each <more> element would have a URI, and the <group> element would be a collection.

Robert Sayre

[0] http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg00763.html