Re: Call for Adoption: SEARCH method

I support adoption of a general-purpose HTTP method that is safe and allows
a request body (e.g. GET with body or safe POST).

This draft provides such a method, but it is framed as bringing the
semantics of WebDAV's SEARCH method to HTTP. I am interested in a general
purpose method, not one with such specific semantics. One example of this
is in the introduction: “Unlike POST, however the semantics of the SEARCH
method are specifically defined.” If adopted, I think the Abstract and
Introduction of this draft needs to be reframed to describe that this is a
general-purpose HTTP method to allow making safe HTTP requests that contain
a request body.

If a WebDAV method name is reused for a generic HTTP use-case, one should
be able to implement and use that without needing to understand how that
method works in WebDAV. In particular, I think the special casing of XML
processing to match WebDAV should be removed if this draft is adopted.

I also agree with Ben Schwartz that there's no need to define responses to
this new method to be uncacheable. (A server could choose to respond to
requests indicating that they're not cacheable if that's the server's
desired behavior.) I'm also confused by when a conditional SEARCH request
would be made if the client doesn't do any caching.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 11:45 AM Mike Bishop <mbishop@evequefou.be> wrote:

> I support adopting this draft, and will read and provide feedback.  There
> is
> interest at Akamai for being able to identify safe POSTs and better manage
> cacheability of the results, especially as it relates to GraphQL.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
> Sent: Tuesday, November 3, 2020 8:07 PM
> To: HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
> Cc: Tommy Pauly <tpauly@apple.com>
> Subject: Call for Adoption: SEARCH method
>
> As discussed in the October 202 Interim, this is a Call for Adoption for
> the
> HTTP SEARCH method draft:
>   https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-snell-search-method-02
>
> Please indicate whether you support adoption in response to this e-mail;
> information about intent to implement (or use) it is also useful.
>
> The Call for Adoption will end on 18 November 2020.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mark and Tommy
>
>
>