Re: Definition of "variant" and "requested variant", was: New "200 OK" status codes, PATCH & PROPFIND

On Aug 17, 2007, at 6:15 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
> The problems that I see here are:
>
> 1) for PROPFIND and friends, not only request header fields and  
> method names, but also the request *body* select the variant -- I  
> don't have a problem with that, but it should be spelled out.

I have lots of problems with that, though I don't think it impacts
the definition of variant. What does PROPFIND specify in the body?

> 2) a bigger problem IMHO is that allowing this additional level of  
> indirection creates different classes of entity tags. Example:  
> Entity tags returned in GET/HEAD/PUT/POST/DELETE can only be used  
> for GET/HEAD/PUT/POST/DELETE. Similarly, for PROPFIND/PROPPATCH.  
> I'm a bit concerned about that.

It is already true in practice -- people just aren't aware of it, or
are inserting fake etags just to comply with nonsense.  From my
perspective, PROPFIND/PROPPATCH are incredibly bad protocols within
a protocol (essentially, search and replace tunneled through other
resource interfaces).  I don't need HTTP to make sense of them any
more than I need it to make sense of POST requests.

....Roy