Associated resource for PUT

Section 5.1 of draft-19 part 2 says, "An HTTP request representation,
when present, is always associated with an anonymous (i.e.,
unidentified) resource." [1]  That makes perfect sense for POST, but for
PUT it makes sense IMO to declare that the representation is associated
with the target resource. Or is the intent that the representation "is
*to become* associated", and is therefore considered anonymous before
the request had been handled?

This is important for at least one reason: I believe this section in the
HTTP spec could be useful to establish a base URI for request entities
according to section 5.1 of the URI spec [2] (which itself might be
underspecified in this regard; it doesn't say much about operations
other than retrieval).

I believe it's not *wrong* for a server to assume the base URI of a
representation PUT to it is that of the target resource. But is that
behavior left to the application? Or should it be standardized? And
should section 5.1 of httpbis say anything about that either way?


Robert Brewer
fumanchu@aminus.org

[1]
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics-19#section-5.
1
[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-5.1.3

Received on Tuesday, 10 July 2012 14:55:41 UTC