LINK/UNLINK

Julian Reschke wrote:
> On 12.10.2010 01:02, Nathan wrote:
>> I'm looking for a quick bit of guidance on whether the Link header would
>> class as representation metadata and thus should be applied to a
>> resource created/modified by a PUT request.
> 
> The Link header spec says "entity header", which is the terminology we 
> used in HTTPbis until draft 10; so I think it's supposed to fall into 
> the same class as "Content-Language", for example.
> 
>> If so great, if not then how would one update the value of a Link header
>> via HTTP?
> 
> The tricky part is of course that PUT *replaces*, so do we expect a PUT 
> request without Link header fields to remove them?
> 
> Alternatives are LINK/UNLINK 
> (<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2068#section-19.6.1>)

What's the status of the LINK and UNLINK methods? I'm aware PATCH has 
been put through standards track under RFC 5789, is there an effort to 
do the same for LINK and UNLINK?

I guess what I'm saying is that since 2068 has been obsoleted by 2616 
which doesn't define them, and since we're now approaching HTTP-Bis 
which again doesn't define them, is it still 'ok' to use LINK and UNLINK 
when the network scale awareness (perhaps) isn't there? (caches may not 
be invalidated etc)

As an aside, would there be scope to redefine them in HTTP-Bis, or would 
this need done under separate RFC as done with PATCH - etc, sure you 
follow my line of questioning :)

Thanks for your reply Julian,

Best,

Nathan

Received on Tuesday, 12 October 2010 21:52:27 UTC