automatically calculated by the server.

   Dead Property - A property whose semantics and syntax are not
   enforced by the server.  The server only records the value of a dead
   property; the client is responsible for maintaining the consistency
   of the syntax and semantics of a dead property.

   Null Resource - A resource which responds with a 404 (Not Found) to
   any HTTP/1.1 or DAV method except for PUT, MKCOL, OPTIONS and LOCK.
   A NULL resource MUST NOT appear as a member of its parent collection.

4  Data Model for Resource Properties

4.1 The Resource Property Model

   Properties are pieces of data that describe the state of a resource.
   Properties are data about data.

   Properties are used in distributed authoring environments to provide
   for efficient discovery and management of resources.  For example, a
   'subject' property might allow for the indexing of all resources by
   their subject, and an 'author' property might allow for the discovery
   of what authors have written which documents.

   The DAV property model consists of name/value pairs.  The name of a
   property identifies the property's syntax and semantics, and provides
   an address by which to refer to its syntax and semantics.

   There are two categories of properties: "live" and "dead".  A live
   property has its syntax and semantics enforced by the server. Live
   properties include cases where a) the value of a property is read-
   only, maintained by the server, and b) the value of the property is
   maintained by the client, but the server performs syntax checking on
   submitted values. All instances of a given live property MUST comply
   with the definition associated with that property name.  A dead
   property has its syntax and semantics enforced by the client; the
   server merely records the value of the property verbatim.

4.2 Existing Metadata Proposals

   Properties have long played an essential role in the maintenance of
   large document repositories, and many current proposals contain some
   notion of a property, or discuss web metadata more generally.  These
   include PICS [REC-PICS], PICS-NG, XML, Web Collections, and several
   proposals on representing relationships within HTML. Work on PICS-NG




 
RFC 2518                         WEBDAV                    February 1999


   and Web Collections has been subsumed by the Resource Description
   Framework (RDF) metadata activity of the World Wide Web Consortium.
   RDF consists of a network-based data model and an XML representation
   of that model.

   Some proposals come from a digital library perspective.  These
   include the Dublin Core [RFC2413] metadata set and the Warwick
   Framework [WF], a container architecture for different metadata
   schemas.  The literature includes many examples of metadata,
   including MARC [USMARC], a bibliographic metadata format, and a
   technical report bibliographic format employed by the Dienst system
   [RFC1807]. Additionally, the proceedings from the first IEEE Metadata
   conference describe many community-specific metadata sets.

   Participants of the 1996 Metadata II Workshop in Warwick, UK [WF],
   noted that "new metadata sets will develop as the networked
   infrastructure matures" and "different communities will propose,
   design, and be responsible for different types of metadata." These
   observations can be corroborated by noting that many community-
   specific sets of metadata already exist, and there is significant
   motivation for the development of new forms of metadata as many
   communities increasingly make their data available in digital form,
   requiring a metadata format to assist data location and cataloging.

4.3 Properties and HTTP Headers

   Properties already exist, in a limited sense, in HTTP message
   headers.  However, in distributed authoring environments a relatively
   large number of properties are needed to describe the state of a
   resource, and setting/returning them all through HTTP headers is
   inefficient.  Thus a mechanism is needed which allows a principal to
   identify a set of properties in which the principal is interested and
   to set or retrieve just those properties.

4.4 Property Values

   The value of a property when expressed in XML MUST be well formed.

   XML has been chosen because it is a flexible, self-describing,
   structured data format that supports rich schema definitions, and
   because of its support for multiple character sets.  XML's self-
   describing nature allows any property's value to be extended by
   adding new elements.  Older clients will not break when they
   encounter extensions because they will still have the data specified
   in the original schema and will ignore elements they do not
   understand.  XML's support for multiple character sets allows any
   human-readable property to be encoded and read in a character set