[Zope-dev] WebDav Bug? -- And some comments on how great WebDAV is ;-)

[Kevin Dangoor]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Lloyd" <brian.lloyd@zope.com>
To: "Robert Rottermann" <robert@redcor.ch>; "Joachim Werner"
<joe@iuveno-net.de>; <zope-dev@zope.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 10:49 AM
Subject: RE: Re: [Zope-dev] WebDav Bug? -- And some comments on how great
WebDAV is ;-)


> > 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.

Less magic is good.

Longer term, it seems like this can be addressed by the Component
architecture, can't it? Ideally the WebDAV Presentation Component would be
given some clues about how to represent the object in WebDAV. Or maybe there
will be a selection of WebDAV components that provide a variety of ways to
deal with it.

> <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.

...while still balancing the desire to easily access objects and methods via
Python. Tricky.

Kevin