Hi Brian, that proposal sounds very good to me. Could it be enhanced in a way that we can add an "add automatic extension when served by webdav". What I mean by that is that an object without extension is "seen" as having say .html appended to it when it is access by webdav. So we can use all these extension based web authoring tools without changing the python way of doing things.
This is an idea that has been kicking around for a while - I am somewhat resistant to it because I have been trying hard to fight for less magic in Zope. It is very hard to implement DWIM (Do What I Mean) and have it do the right thing in all situations - it often turns out to be fragile and easily broken as the system evolves. That's not to say that we absolutely wouldn't do it - but there are enough internal ramifications and questions to be answered that I don't see how this would get done by 2.5. I'd be happy to see a proposal that addresses how deeply that magic would have to affect other parts of the system (as DAV support is largely implemented on top of other APIs) and the scope of the behavior and effort (I would expect that if DAV acted that way, then FTP should too). <soapbox> IMHO, I'd rather see the things that make using file extensions a pain in the first place go away. The "death to index_html" part of my proposal is a first step toward that. If web-oriented tools expect to be able to use file extensions, then Zope needs to do what people expect. If people trying to start using Zope are immediately stymied by bizarre issues with something that they take so for granted (file extensions), they'll never get far enough to see all of the things that are great about Zope. </soapbox> Brian Lloyd brian@zope.com Zope Corporation www.zope.com