Re: i22: ETags on PUT responses

Werner Baumann wrote:
> >My understanding is that your proposal changes the semantics of RFC2616, 
> > breaks existing servers, and rules out lots of applications what work 
> >fine today.
> >
> Your examples:
> XCAP, CalDAV and AtomPub. They are protocols, defined in an RFC. These 
> protocols (hopefully) clear the matter of rewriting by the server. When 
> a client and a server use one of these protocols, this is clearly caught 
> by "unless it knows that the client is aware of this changes and can 
> handle them". There is no conflict and nothing is ruled out.

The problem is middleware, such as generic HTTP protocol libraries,
generic HTTP caching libraries, and HTTP proxies: these can handle
Etags and conditional requests themselves, but such middleware doesn't
know about the different types of server.  That's why it's called
generic.

-- Jamie