Re: draft-snell-http-prefer

A much older version of the specification included an optional
Preference-Applied response header that could explicitly indicate whether a
particular preference was applied, but after lots of feedback that "I
wasn't going to need it", I pulled it back out (largely against my better
judgement). I'm thinking that perhaps it needs to be added back in.

- James

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 7:27 AM, Ken Murchison <murch@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm working on draft draft-murchison-webdav-prefer which describes how the
> return-minimal and return-representation apply to WebDAV/CalDAV methods.
>  My work is primarily CalDAV-centric but we are trying to make it generic
> to WebDAV and its derivatives.
>
> One of the issues that keeps coming up is a way for the client to
> differentiate between two  cases:
>
> - the server doesn't return a representation because it ignored or doesn't
> support the return-representation preference
>
> - the server understood the preference but didn't return a representation
> because it didn't change from what was in the request
>
> One possible solution is for the server to return a Vary: Prefer header to
> indicate that the server understood the preference, thereby allowing the
> client to infer what the lack of a representation in the response means.
>
> The next question is, does any such mandate or recommendation, if
> required, belong in my webdav-prefer draft or in the base Prefer spec?
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --
> Kenneth Murchison
> Principal Systems Software Engineer
> Carnegie Mellon University
>
>