Subject: Server-Maintained Orderings

From: "Slein, Judith A" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 17:00:16 -0500

At the moment, the Ordered Collections spec contains some minimal support
for server-maintained orderings.  The design team would like to remove that
support.

The rationale for removing it is that unless we are willing to define a
standard set of server-maintained orderings that servers must support in
order to be compliant, we don't really gain any interoperability.  And we
are not willing to go that far.

At the moment, all we are able to do is provide a way for clients to
discover what server-maintained orderings are available and choose one.  But
if the client was not designed to work with the particular server (so that
it understands the tokens identifying the orderings), the list of available
orderings will be meaningless to the client.  So there is no gain in
interoperability.

Given this state of affairs, the consensus among the design team was that it
would be better to do nothing at all in support of server-maintained
orderings, leaving anyone who wants to design a well-thought-out extension
to the protocol in the future completely free to design server-maintained
orderings as they wish.

--Judy

Judith A. Slein
Xerox Corporation
[email-masked]
(716)422-5169
800 Phillips Road 105/50C
Webster, NY 14580

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From: Jim Davis <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Dec 1999 22:21:07 +0100

Makes total sense.  Just be sure you capture the rationale, because it's
likely that people will  ask for this feature again in the future, so let's
be ready to tell them why not.