Re: issue 79: must understand content-* header fields or fail

Haven't heard any objection, so we'll try that.

This resolution will also close #102.


On 14/07/2010, at 7:45 AM, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> I've seen one message agreeing with Roy's proposal to remove the Content-* language as per below.
> 
> Note that doing this would close both #79 and #102 <http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/102>.
> 
> In the discussion of #102, Roy said
> 
>> At most, this should only warn implementations that all of the metadata needs to be understood or discarded whenever changes are made to the corresponding data.
> 
> 
> I think it's worth adding a bit of (non-requirement) guidance to the definition of PUT along these lines if we remove this requirement.
> 
> Any objections to closing these issues by doing so?
> 
> 
> 
> On 30/07/2009, at 8:24 PM, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> 
>> The editors spent some time discussing
>> 
>> http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/79
>> 
>> with regard to the requirement in RFC 2616, section.9.6,
>> the description of PUT:
>> 
>> "The recipient of the entity MUST NOT ignore any Content-*
>> (e.g. Content-Range) headers that it does not understand or
>> implement and MUST return a 501 (Not Implemented) response
>> in such cases."
>> 
>> The purpose of this requirement was to enable some future
>> use of Content-Range for the purpose of partial updates.
>> 
>> No server that I am aware of supports that requirement.
>> Partial updates should be accomplished using a new method
>> (PATCH) rather than a retroactive requirement on deployed
>> services that nobody implemented.
>> 
>> My proposal is to remove that sentence from the spec and
>> note in the changes section that the requirement was removed
>> in favor of deploying PATCH.
>> 
>> ....Roy
>> 
> 
> 
> --
> Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/
> 
> 


--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Thursday, 29 July 2010 12:19:35 UTC