questions -- clarifications requested

I have a new respect for Roy's "8 dimensional table".  The requests 
aren't so bad (which is what I was thinking about when I said I'd do 
it), but the responses are where the dimensions pile up. I'm still 
cranking away at it. But, as I was trying to create the synopses for 
each of the methods, I came across the following questions (in the 
context of HTTP 1.1); trying to be sure of the answers slowed me down some:

1. Is the DELETE method allowed to have an Entity-Header and 
Entity-Body in the request? (I would think not.)

2. Are the LINK and UNLINK methods allowed to have an Entity-Body in 
the request? Or any Entity-Header field other than "Link:"? (I would 
think not.)

(In this message, by "allowed" I mean that clients aren't supposed to 
send, and servers must ignore if sent.)

3. In the PUT, DELETE, LINK, and UNLINK methods, is the intent that 
content negotiation is allowed (via the Accept* request header fields), 
but it is for the purpose of negotiating the content of the entity that 
describes the result, not the entity corresponding to the URI? (I would 
think so.)

4. Is the Title entity-header field required in PUT and POST methods? 
Strongly suggested? Or optional? (I'd guess it's one of these :-)

5. Is the Title entity-header field allowed in the request for DELETE, 
UNLINK, and LINK methods? (I would think not.)

6. Is the URI-header entity-header field allowed in the request for 
PUT, DELETE, UNLINK, and LINK methods? (I would think not.)

7. Is the Expires entity-header field allowed in requests for PUT and 
POST methods? (I.e., can the client specify when the resource is to 
expire when they create it?) How about in DELETE, LINK and UNLINK?

8. Is the Last-modified entity-header field allowed in requests for 
PUT, POST, DELETE, LINK and UNLINK methods? I.e., can a client specify 
the last-modified date of a resource?

9. Is the Expires entity-header field ever returned from POST, PUT, 
DELETE, LINK or UNLINK methods? (These are never cached, and the 
description implies of Expires implies it is only used for caching purposes.)

10. Can the PUT, DELETE, LINK, and UNLINK methods ever return 303 (See 
Other) status code?  If so, does it mean that the method succeeded or failed?

11. Is it the intent that PUT, DELETE, LINK, and UNLINK methods ever 
return 204 (No Content), which is supposed to mean that there is no new 
content to show? If they don't want to return a description of the 
result of the request, do they return Content-Length of 0, or 204? Same 
question for POST? For POST, it seems more plausible that there might 
be a sequence of POSTs, some of which returned 204 if the result of the 
query had not changed.

Paul

Received on Tuesday, 29 August 1995 01:10:05 UTC