Subject: Protocol Action: 'Collection Synchronization for WebDAV' to Proposed Standard (draft-daboo-webdav-sync-08.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:13:25 -0800

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Collection Synchronization for WebDAV'
  (draft-daboo-webdav-sync-08.txt) as a Proposed Standard

This document has been reviewed in the IETF but is not the product of an
IETF Working Group.

The IESG contact person is Peter Saint-Andre.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-daboo-webdav-sync/

Technical Summary

   This specification defines an extension to WebDAV that allows
   efficient synchronization of the contents of a WebDAV collection.

   WebDAV (RFC 4918) defines the concept of 'collections' which are
   hierarchical groupings of WebDAV resources on an HTTP
   server.  Collections can be of arbitrary size and depth (i.e.,
   collections within collections).  WebDAV clients that cache resource
   content need a way to synchronize that data with the server (i.e.,
   detect what has changed and update their cache).  This can currently
   be done using a WebDAV PROPFIND request on a collection to list all
   members of a collection along with their DAV:getetag property values,
   which allows the client to determine which were changed, added or
   deleted.  However, this does not scale well to large collections as
   the XML response to the PROPFIND request will grow with the
   collection size.

   This specification defines a new WebDAV report that results in the
   server returning to the client only information about those member
   URIs that were added or deleted, or whose mapped resources were
   changed, since a previous execution of the report on the collection.

   Additionally, a new property is added to collection resources that is
   used to convey a "synchronization token" that is guaranteed to change
   when the collection's member URIs or their mapped resources have
   changed.

Working Group Summary

   This document is not the product of a working group.  However, it
   has been discussed on the [email-masked] and reviewed
   among implementers in the calendaring and scheduling community.
   Consensus was quite smooth.  There was some slight controversy
   about whether servers should be allowed to return reports with a
   depth of infinity, but that issue was decided in the positive because
   some implementers have uses for such reporting.

Document Quality

   There are several independent implementations (mostly email clients 
   and calendaring applications).

Personnel

   The Document Shepherd / Responsible Area Director is
   Peter Saint-Andre.