

Re: sorted response inefficient for UIs that need indendation.

From: Mark D. Anderson <mda@discerning.com>
Date: Sat, 20 Jun 1998 09:42:20 -0700
Message-ID: <004401bd9c6a$64df8ac0$0200a8c0@mdaxke.mediacity.com>
To: <www-webdav-dasl@w3.org>, "Jim Davis" <jdavis@parc.xerox.com>
Your proposal only deals with a primary sort. What if
I want to retrieve the author, the document type (book
vs. article), and the title, and have the results
indented 2-deep?

It strikes me that this is actually a directive for
how results should be returned, not a modification of
the query, and the two notions should be kept separate.

The client could specify that it accepts/prefers results
returned with "encoded-repeaters". The server returns
with results in that form, with a header indicating that
they are encoded in that fashion and indicating what
the special value is that is used to note a repeated
value (another issue you don't address is how to ensure
that the value of your "sortindex" is never confused 
with a real value).

Basically this amounts to support for a "ditto" value.
This would save space, and a little time.
Note that with ditto support, repeaters are shown
even for properties not under a sort. That is probably
fine, as the client doesn't necessarily have a use for
this feature even on sorted columns, if the primary
and secondary sorted columns don't happen to be
the first and second ones returned.

Note that this feature does start down a slippery slope.
The next step would be to get the server to actually
return results according to an html template provided
by the client, or something like that.

Received on Saturday, 20 June 1998 12:42:27 GMT
