Datatypes for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Properties
draft-reschke-webdav-property-datatypes-09

[Ballot comment]
Comment from review by Spencer Dawkins:

In Section 7, "Compatibility Considerations", the following two considerations appear:

  Clients not aware of datatype handling should not supply the "xsi:
  type" attribute on property elements (after all, this attribute
  belongs to the XML Schema-Instance namespace which has been defined
  for exactly this purpose).  Old clients should also ignore additional
  attributes on property elements returned by PROPFIND (and similar
  methods), although the WebDAV specification only defines this
  behaviour for unknown elements (and is silent about unknown
  attributes).

  Servers not aware of datatype handling either drop the "xsi:type"
  attribute, or persist it along with the property value.  However,
  they will never indicate successful parsing of the data type by
  returning back the type in the response to PROPPATCH.  Thus, clients
  can supply type information without having to poll for server support
  in advance.

I would feel quite a bit better if the "should" and "will never" actually referenced normative text in some specification somewhere - the document feels like it's relying on common implementation behaviors without these references, and that would be quite a bit more likely to trip over compatibility issues.

I also wondered about "should" vs. "SHOULD", but decided that "requirements" for clients and servers that aren't aware of this capability are probably problematic anyway :-)

I've reviewed the wg archives and I believe that this document does not represent an end run
around the working group; the working group was kept in the loop on this draft on a consistent basis
and reviews submitted were acted upon.