XMLizing Folders?

[Dave Winer]

>>Re crashing sounds, I was thinking about the security implications.
Browsing any directory -- filesystem, name service, phone book,
employee database, database catalog, etc -- is security-sensitive.

That's a server issue. The server sysop decides which resources should be
accessible this way and by whom. HTTP and specific servers already have
provisions for this, and it has zero effect on the XML used to transmit the
contents of the folder, the two are completely independent issues.

Re having a style sheet, I could see where that would be useful if you
wanted to look at these structures in a web browser, and I'm sure someone
will do one, or five people will do five, and they'll all look like an
outliner. Aside from that, I don't want to browse these things, I want
scripts to be able to walk the structures. How it displays is almost
irrelevant in that context.

I also got a thoughtful email from Alex Hopmann at Microsoft who's been
working on WebDAV, and now I have a comparison between this and what DAV is
doing, so I may see how to fit that into our framework, which was one of my
goals in doing this work, to see if it really had to be so complicated and
to see where it fits in. He says he's going to write a WebDAV tutorial, and
*that* would really be something. We need more HOWTOs in this world, fewer
specs, more working code, more things to be compatible with. I know that's
my usual story, but I still believe it's true! (We're making progress,
IE5/Beta 2 changes things quite a bit.)

Dave




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