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Re: getting WebDAV SEARCH ready for the IESG

by Julian Reschke :: Rate this Message:

John Barone wrote:

>> However, it seems to me that the text in 2.3.1 was phrased this way on
> purpose
>> -- there may be cases where it's not possible to first sort,
>> then truncate. For instance, when searching can be delegated to an
> underlying
>> SQL store, but ordering can not, how would you implement that?
>> Thus, I'm hesitant doing any change over here.
>
> Completely understood. I'm just saying a client may not want results
> that aren't ordered over the entire result set. It might be preferred
> to get no results (and have to further refine the search) than to get
> truncated results that aren't "globaly" ordered.

I do agree that this may be more useful. I'm just skeptic about making
this change many years after people have written implementations.

>> If you feel strongly about that, we *could* add a statement into the
> "future extensions" appendix.
>
> I don't feel that strongly about this, just a nice-to-have for some
> clients.
>
>
>> And yes, the inconsistency with 5.17.1 is a bit awkward, but I'm
> really not
>> sure we can change this at this point of time.
>
> This I think is a bigger deal. If you acknowledge that some servers
> cannot (at least easily) order a global result set and then limit the
> results returned, then how can this be a MUST? Seems like the same
> issue to me.

I just checked the document's history, and that particular requirement
was added in 2003, see the thread around
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webdav-dasl/2002OctDec/0033.html>.
Back then we probably did not realize that we're introducing an
inconsistency between truncation (server enforced) and limiting (on
behalf of the client).

If this is a minor problem, we should just state it somewhere. If it's a
major problem, we could try to fix it. The server I worked on didn't
truncate, so I don't have a strong preference. That being said, it would
be interesting to know how the other servers (Xythos, Catacomb,
Slide...?) behave...

BR, Julian

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