Subject: Using absolute URIs in headers and properties in DAV

From: Lisa Dusseault <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 12:55:45 -0700

Originally in RFC2518, the Destination header, the If header and the 
<href> element all contained only absolute URIs (no paths).  Then, 
after the 2002 Interop, we opened that up so that RFC2518bis now says 
the Destination header could take "abs path" as well.  However, it was 
then pointed out (Dec 9 2002 mail) that we should make the If header 
consistent with the Destination header, which might also imply making 
the <href> format the same.  Nobody followed up on that Dec 9 2002 mail 
as far as I can see, so I'd like to reraise the issue.

1.  Status quo in 'bis' -- are we really sure we want to make the 
Destination header inconsistent with the other DAV elements that take 
URI values?
2.  Back to RFC2518 status -- only one option (full URIs) consistent 
across all uses
3.  Forge ahead and allow absolute paths in Destination, If header, and 
possibly also <href>.  Doesn't this have backward compatibility issues?

I'd like to recheck our reasoning on this one, and whether there's 
really a need to allow absolute paths in the value of Destination 
header.  It was an interoperability issue, but I don't have all the 
details on why clients might find it difficult to include the 
server/host part of the URI.

Lisa

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2004 08:12:42 +0200

Lisa Dusseault wrote:

> <href> element all contained only absolute URIs (no paths).  Then, after 
> the 2002 Interop, we opened that up so that RFC2518bis now says the 
> Destination header could take "abs path" as well.  However, it was then 
> pointed out (Dec 9 2002 mail) that we should make the If header 

Note that we already allow non-absolute URIs in href elements (right now 
defined as per 3.2.1 of RFC2068), so the inconsistency is just with 
places where we currently require "Coded-URL".

Anyway, the spec should only be changed if that change doesn't break 
existing servers. So if one of Apache/moddav, MS IIS (and possibly 
others) do not allow non-absolute URIs , we shouldn't make any change.

Julian

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