12, 14.43: resource arguments and conneg

Roy's rewrite of the conneg sections in draft-04 is superb!  Just 
a small terminology nitpick:

Roy T. Fielding <fielding@ics.uci.edu> writes (14.43):
> An HTTP/1.1 server MUST include an appropriate Vary header field with
> any response that is subject to server-driven negotiation.
...
> A Vary field value consisting of a list of field-names signals that
> the representation selected for the response is based on a selection
> algorithm which considers ONLY the listed request-header field values
> in selecting the most appropriate representation.

Somehow the terminology needs to acknowledge that the responses
to methods which allow an entity-body in the request are already
assumed to depend on that entity-body -- but that this variation
is neither considered to be "content negotiation", nor a change
in the "requested resource".  Otherwise, the above could be
misconstrued to mean that POST automatically requires "Vary: *".

I think the simplest way is to talk about "resources (method calls)
with arguments".  If that concept is defined up front, the only
change needed within the conneg sections is to replace "resource"
by "resource with arguments" in most places.

--
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Paul Burchard   <burchard@cs.princeton.edu>
``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
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Received on Saturday, 1 June 1996 04:17:15 UTC