Re: GET on a reference

At 08:22 AM 6/29/98 PDT, Judith Slein wrote:
>I agree that this is the direction the discussion in Redmond seemed to be
>pointing.

>There is a requirement (3.1.4) that operations on a referential member not
>affect the resource it references.... If requests were automatically
redirected to its target resource,
>this would not be possible.

There is nothing automatic about the 302 response.  A client can decide
whether to chase the link or not.  And so what if it is automatic?  By
hypothesis, the client does not understand DAV, so there's no choice it can
make.  Is there any operation that John's proposal makes impossible?  I
think not.

>Similarly for PUT, the client might be wanting to replace the content of
>the target resource, but on the other hand it might be wanting to replace
>the reference with an ordinary resource that has content. 

I don't think John proposed that a PUT do redirection.  Don't we already
say that PUT on a referential resource is an error, just as PUT on a
collection is an error?

It's not even clear to me it would do anything.  (e.g, if you do a PUT with
Netscape and it gets a 302 response does it retry the PUT at the new URL?)
 
I see nothing to object to in John's proposal.

Received on Monday, 29 June 1998 18:27:08 UTC