Hi,
this certainly looks like a feature set that will be hard to standardize.
Maybe it makes sense to look at how others have dealt with it?
1) JCR doesn't have structured properties per se, but can support
complex hierarchies of content nodes. So the structure is not *in* the
properties, but in the tree of nodes they are contained in.
This approach is very flexible, and also solves the issue of
queryability. On the other hand, it's also hard to implement on top of
systems that do not happen to support this in the first place.
2) WebDAV properties can complain arbitrary XML, thus any kind of
hierarchy *can* be represented inside a WebDAV property (*). This is
extremely simple to implement in a repository (essentially it can treat
those properties as strings, with only one additional flag stating it's
XML).
The drawbacks here are that the property can only be manipulated and
access-controlled in total, and that there's no solution for query (yet).
...both approaches are flexible and can represent just anything; but
because of their flexibility clients and servers are more tightly
coupled (because they need to understand the specific format/structure).
BR, Julian
(*) Of course binary values would be problematic...
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