- From: Mike Kelly <mikekelly321@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 10:10:20 +0000
- To: "Eric J. Bowman" <eric@bisonsystems.net>
- Cc: Martin Thomson <martin.thomson@gmail.com>, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 5:27 AM, Eric J. Bowman <eric@bisonsystems.net> wrote: > Martin Thomson wrote: >> >> I agree with Mike that PATCH (or a special POST) aren't visibly >> idempotent, which is a crucial characteristic if this is going to >> work. >> > > If 99.9% of partial updates are non-idempotent, wouldn't the need for > idempotent partial update be an edge case, as opposed to crucial? > > What we're trying to make visible on the wire is *sender intent* not > idempotency. The sender doesn't intend to make idempotent vs. non- > idempotent requests. Idempotency is a property of the request method, > not a sender intent in and of itself. No. What we should be trying to make visible "on the wire" are properties of a request that are useful/valuable for intermediate processing. The idempotency of a request is valuable for intermediate processing, because infrastructure can be developed to re-issue a client request on network failure. Having a request guaranteed to be non-partial is not useful or valuable for intermediate processing, apparently there are no examples of intermediary mechanisms which leverage this. Cheers, Mike
Received on Tuesday, 28 February 2012 10:10:48 UTC