Re: Distributed Authoring Proposals

Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> 
> >I suggest considering eliminating COPY and instead using
> >PUT, but when the value being PUT is Content-Type:
> >message/external-body, then the server can copy the data
> >from the original source.
> 
> I disagree.  Doing a PUT of a message/external-body means you want
> to create or replace a resource that consists of a message/external-body.
> The same problem applies with using multipart/related to imply a different
> action than that requested by the method.
> 
> Not surprisingly, I prefer COPY for asking the server to perform a copy,
> and the PATCH method for asking the server to perform a partial update.
> PATCH had the additional benefit that it was independent of content-type,
> and thus I wouldn't have to argue with Fabio about VTML or the MIME folks
> about multipart/mixed+message/partial or any number of other data formats
> that are great for some tasks and not for others.
> 
> These and other failed attempts at standardizing WEBDAV functionality
> within HTTP can be seen in
> 
> http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/history/draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-01.html
> 
> .....Roy

I think in MIME that "message" and "multipart" are treated specially.
They're not just "application", they're media type where the sender
intends for the recipient to actually unwrap the message. I don't think
you should *ever* store something as "multpart". Rather, a content
negotiated resource is "multpart/alternative", message/http is just
another wrapper around the HTTP message as if the wrapper weren't there,
etc.


--
http://www.parc.xerox.com

Received on Saturday, 22 March 1997 04:57:36 UTC