Re: #547 clarify PUT on content negotiated resource

* Julian Reschke wrote:
><http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/547>
>
>During IESG revied, Ted Lemon came up with this question:
>
>> The paragraph crossing the page break at the bottom of page 16 (ed: <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics-25.html#rfc.section.3.1.4.2.p.8>):
>>
>>    For example, if a client makes a PUT request on a negotiated resource
>>    and the origin server accepts that PUT (without redirection), then
>>    the new state of that resource is expected to be consistent with the
>>    one representation supplied in that PUT; the Content-Location cannot
>>    be used as a form of reverse content selection identifier to update
>>    only one of the negotiated representations.  If the user agent had
>>    wanted the latter semantics, it would have applied the PUT directly
>>    to the Content-Location URI.
>>
>> It's good that there's an example here, but this creates more questions
>> than it answers: if I do a PUT to a particular URI, for which there are
>> currently multiple representations of the document in different languages,
>> based on a GET that had a specific language representation, is the 
>> semantics being specified here that the other language representations 
>> go away? That's kind of what it sounds like.

>To which I replied:
>
>Mainly it means that it's a bad idea to do it, unless the other language 
>versions are automatically updated somehow. The main point is that if 
>you want a single variant of a content-negotiated resource to be 
>authorable, you better serve it with a specific Content-Location, so 
>that the authoring client then can use the specific URI to update just 
>that variant.

It seems plausible to me that a PUT to a negotiated resource might turn
it into a non-negotiated resource. Using PUT to change how the resource
is negotiated (say, link a new variant to it so it can be considered in
future negotiations) does not seem that far off either. I do not really
see the difficulty in understanding the text above.
-- 
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Received on Friday, 10 January 2014 19:57:48 UTC