RE: Proposed replacement text for Section 1.6

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org] 
> Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2004 2:05 AM
> To: Hugo Haas
> Cc: Champion, Mike; www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Proposed replacement text for Section 1.6
> 
> 

> "The REST Web is the subset of the WWW (based on HTTP) in 
> which agents provide uniform interface semantics -- 
> essentially create, retrieve, update and delete -- rather 
> than arbitrary or application-specific interfaces, and 
> manipulate resources only by the exchange of representations."
> 
> I don't think it's useful to mention the uniform interface 
> there, since it doesn't distinguish it from the Web where the 
> uniform interface constraint is pervasive (GET and POST 
> specifically).  IMO, the biggest difference between the style 
> of the architecture of the Web, and REST, is cookies, by a long shot.

Well ... I guess I was thinking of the fact that HTTP POST is used by an
awful lot of sites as more or less a generic data tunnel to a server-side
process and not a way to request that a server "accept the entity enclosed
in the request as a new subordinate of the resource identified by the
Request-URI."  The list of examples of what POST is supposed to be used for
in RFC 2616 seems awfully limited compared to what is actually done --
essentially RPCs, in many cases even before SOAP was invented. XML-RPC and
SOAP were originally intended more to bring order to the chaos out there in
the world of hand-coded RPC over CGI than to add new RPC capabilities,
AFAIK.  So, it seems highly contrived to argue that the Web As It Is uses a
constrained interface, but SOAP-RPC is a Bad Thing because it does not.   I
do agree that cookies are an even more glaring example of the difference
between REST and the Web As It Is.
 
> Also - and I think I commented on this before - "CRUD" is 
> only an example of another constrained interface, not one 
> constrained to have uniform semantics.  I'd suggest just 
> saying "-- GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, and any other method which 
> can be implemented by all resources".

I'd be happy to adopt your suggestion here.

Received on Sunday, 25 January 2004 02:36:38 UTC