WEBDAV Working Group
          Munich IETF
          August 11, 1997

          A meeting of the World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and
          Versioning (WEBDAV) Working Group was held at the Munich IETF on
          August 11, 1997.  Jim Whitehead chaired the meeting, and Del
          Jensen recorded meeting notes.  Over the duration of the meeting
          there were 54 attendees.  These minutes, the agenda, and slides
          presented during the meeting are accessible on the Web at URL
          <http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/munich/>.

          The meeting began with a review of the agenda, which was accepted
          without modification.  Following this, Jim Whitehead began a
          series of three presentations.  The first presentation was a
          brief high-level overview of the functionality being considered
          by the WEBDAV working group.  This included information on the
          status of the requirements document, which should have a new
          version out by August 27, 1997, the protocol document, which
          should have a new draft out by August 29, 1997, and the scenarios
          document, on which work has stalled.  It is expected that the
          requirements document will begin a working group last call after
          this next draft has been released.  This is the final step before
          forwarding this document along to the IESG.

          After this presentation, Jim Whitehead gave another presentation
          outlining the key design elements of the properties, collections,
          and namespace operations aspects of the protocol specification. 
          Notes on this presentation follow:

           1. Properties
             a. Definition and structure
             b. New methods

           2. Collections
             a. Definition and structure

          Q: Why have internal members?  Why are not all members specified
          as external (absolute URIs)?
          A: The well-defined specification of existing methods on external
          members can be problematic across namespace boundaries.  Internal
          membership is convenient for modeling file system behavior, which
          one anticipates to be a common use for collections.  Container
          models that are more exotic than the simple hierarchical model
          are not excluded by the proposed structure for collections.
             b. Methods

           3. The Source Link

          Once the two overview presentations were completed, Jim Whitehead
          led a discussion of open issues using slides which listed the
          issue, gave pro and con discussion on the issue, and then listed
          a recommended resolution to the issue.  Discussion on these
          issues is summarized below -- for more detail consult the






          original slide presentation.

           A. Property Instance URL encoding
               Problem:  Get rid of the DAV switch
               Solution: Discovery of Property names
               Informal Poll: Adopted

           B. Retrieval of Properties
               Problem:  Search is too complicated for WEBDAV scope
               Solution: Simplified set of methods to retrieve property
                         names and values on a by-resource basis.
               Informal Poll: Adopted

           C. Property Attributes
               Problem:  Resource level granularity for property attributes
                         (e.g., live, readonly) can make schemas
                         inconsistent
               Solution: Raise attribute granularity to schema level.
               Informal Poll: Adopted

           D. Method Recursive Semantics for Collections
               Problem:  Agreement on well-defined extension of current
                         methods is hard to get, and aspects of this
                         problem are arguably outside the scope of WEBDAV.
               Solution: Define only "level 0" behavior.
               Informal Poll: Adopted

           E. Atomic Locking of Collections
               Problem:  The current requirements document specifies that
                         WEBDAV provide this functionality.  The protocol
                         draft may provide only a partial solution.
               Solution: None

           F. Support for Variants
               Problem:  The current specification is silent on how to add
                         or change resource variants.
               Solution: None at present, take to list (possibilities:
                         transparent content negotiation, content-location
                         header, translation-of/supercedes relationships)

          *** Meeting adjourned ***