Re: Thoughts on relation to WebDAV

> >>If you buy a WebDAV-server from a vendor and later notice it does not 
> >>support MKCOL. Does it matter whether this is standard compliant?
> >
> >So how exactly is it an improvement to the client when the server claims 
> >it can do MKCOL, but always returns 403? That would be compliant with 
> >RFC2518, but not helpful it all.
> >
> 
> It is not an improvement at all. In my opinion it would be fraud.
> A server that does not support creation of collections is *not* 
> compliant with RFC 2518 (and, I hope, with RFC 4918 neither) and must 
> not send a DAV-header at all. Hiding this none-compliance by misusing 
> 403 makes things worse.

But every webdav client I've seen REQUIRES the DAV-header to operate on
an URL as on a WebDAV collection. So it means You would practically disalow
any partial (e.g. a read-only) WebDAV implementation, even if it works
correctly and the full-fledged functionality is not needed at all!

> This does not mean, that it is not allowed to create and use servers and 
> clients, that do not meet all requirements of the standard (or the 
> proposed standard), and therefore are not compliant. But these needs to 
> be documented and server and clients will need out of band information 
> about their capabilities to be set up properly. There will be no 
> guarantee for interoperability with other clients or servers. These 
> cases are outside the spec.

So the spec is wrong and insane if it doesn't allow for a partial implementation.
Sorry.

> Werner

-- 
Petr Tomasek <http://www.etf.cuni.cz/~tomasek>
Jabber: butrus@jabbim.cz
SIP: butrus@ekiga.net

Received on Saturday, 24 May 2008 13:22:21 UTC