- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 23:48:35 PST
- To: "Yaron Goland" <yarong@microsoft.com>, "'Sanford L. Barr'" <sbarr@interwoven.com>, <ejw@ics.uci.edu>, "'WEBDAV WG'" <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>, <jdavis@parc.xerox.com>
>If someone writes a buggy client that is so unbelievably stupid that it >assumes that resources do not change over time then might I respectfully >suggest that the market will very quickly make the product a failure. > >This is not an issue of a protocol requirement, this is an issue of common >sense. > >Alas, one can not require common sense. It is common to require that services protect themselves against clients that misbehave. Even though misbehavior might be against "common sense" from some perspectives, there are so many applications for an un-guarded PUT that it's not against "common sense" to believe that a client might be capable of doing a PUT without a lock, and that some user might misapply this operation to a server that otherwise had a perfectly good locking mechanism. And it is also the case that products that don't guard against such misbehavior might STILL be a success in the marketplace. All in all, I think there's a place for some discussion of the issues in the Webdav spec, even if it is an implementation note. Implementation notes have the advantage of not forming requirements for 'common sense', but at least in making it more common. Regards, Larry
Received on Tuesday, 17 February 1998 02:49:19 UTC