On Fri, 2002-04-26 at 13:41, Kendall Clark wrote: > >>>>> "ian" == Ian Bicking <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > >> Of course it is, as others have noted. I have several such > >> collections in my main Web app: > >> > >> /images /articles /authors /subjects > > ian> But the next level is highly contextualized in a way that is > ian> difficult to generalize over other collections. > > Right, that's why I'm suggesting we *not* generalize, out of the box, > for Webware's WebDAV. > > /articles/500 > ian> is easy enough to parse, but then if you have a heterogeneous > ian> collection /mideast, what does /mideast/500 mean? > > If /mideast is a DAV collection, /mideast/500 is a member-uri of that > collection. That's what it means in DAV semantics. > > I'm suggest, contrary to what you say at the end, that you can use DAV > to manage collections of *output resources*, despite your saying that > it's not useful to do so. :>
HTTP manages output resources fine, it seems. What sort of situation are you thinking of where you'd use WebDAV? I really can't think of any. Especially with HTML, where you can embed the values of properties directly in the page. > I feel the same > ian> about /articles/500/printable -- I think that should be > ian> /articles/500?printable or somesuch. > > This need to impose *one* view of how to build URI interfaces is > interesting. I don't think it really gets us anywhere, since it's not > especially germane to implementing DAV. Tastes and styles and > approaches legitimately differ. So far URLs have been linked to the servlets on our servers. This has been less than optimal, but it never really mattered because most users interact with the URLs simply by clicking links, and it doesn't matter if they are less than perfect. With WebDAV I'm specifically considering Web Folders -- they are the most compelling WebDAV client implementation right now, and many future clients will probably look like them (Mac has something similar, doesn't it?) Good URLs are *very* important for Web Folders -- the only interface you present is essentially those URLs. Sure, in HTTP it's fine to have /articles/500 and /articles/500/print -- but that is that supposed to look like in Web Folders? The WebDAV spec specifically says it's okay to GET and PUT to a collection, but it doesn't say that clients have to make that easy, and I don't think they will. In this case, /articles/500 is a collection if you also allow /articles/500/print, which makes it very difficult to work with. Perhaps linking the output resource to the source resource will mitigate this problem, I'm not sure. Titles also all of the sudden have to start making sense. "500" doesn't mean anything to the user. In fact, it means very little to the server unless it is prepended by /articles/. /mideast/500 isn't useful -- supposing /mideast is a conceptual collection, not type-based, and it can contain images and articles, then /mideast/500 is ambiguous. It should probably be /mideast/articles-500, or /mideast/Recent%20Events, or maybe even /mideast/Recent%20Events.html I'm not saying we should come up with a One Right Way to do URLs, but the way I've been using -- and I believe other's as well -- is bad UI when used with WebDAV. I don't want to impose a specific way to doing this, but extraPathURL won't, IMHO, work well enough. (Of course, it's probably a fine place to start with -- getting something working alright is better than not working perfectly). Ian _______________________________________________ Webware-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/webware-discuss
