Re: Second Working Group Last Call: QUERY

Hi Julian,

We are in our festival season here, so I could not get to this sooner. Editorial suggestions and fixes for your consideration:

1. Abstract. Nothing wrong with it, but it would be nice to align the language with RFC9110, Section 9.3.3,

Suggest: "The QUERY method requests that the target resource process the representation enclosed in the request in a safe/idempotent manner according to the resource's own specific semantics and return the result."

Additionally, you might want to add something like: "This enables clients to make complex queries that might be too voluminous to be described using query parameters. It is similar to POST ..." to clarify the "why" of this spec in the abstract.

2. Similarly, for first para, under Section 1:

Replace: "containing content that describes" => "that encloses a representation describing"

3. Paragraph below the POST example in Section 1 is quite verbose.

Suggest: "In this variation, it is not readily apparent..."

4. First para under 2. Query, says, "The query operation is described by the request content."

The second para starts as,  "The content of the request and its media type define the query."

Suggest: Drop the sentence in first para. Possibly simplify sentence structure in para 1.

5. Section 2.1, Para 2

Replace: "The list below describe" => "The list below describes" 


6. Fourth Bullet in 2.1 


Replace: "can not" => "cannot"

7. Section 2.2: either all instances or first instance of "equivalent resource" should be italicized, or none should be (currently the one in second para is not). I think the correct thing though is to cross-link terms from outside and not italicize. Please check against the style-guide.

8. Section 2.5, Para 2

Replace: "A response with either of the status codes" => "A response with either status codes".
For consistency, replace: "Likewise, a response with either" => "Likewise, a response with either status codes".

Close the bracket after, "(Found, [HTTP], Section 15.4.3"

9. The "For Instance, by" in 4th paragraph under Section 2.7 should be a continuation of the previous section to preserve a sentence structure for the bullets. Actually, para 3 might better read "To improve cache efficiency, caches MAY remove semantically insignificant differences first, for instance, by:". 


10. Section 2.6 Para 2: "A conditional QUERY requests that that selected representation".

Remove extra "that". Replace it with an article.

11. Section 2.7 Para 1:

Remove spurious close bracket before the full stop.

12. Section 2.7, last two para:

Clients is plural, where as client is singular in the rest of the spec.

(Servers is plural in 4 places out of 30+ throughout the document)

13. Section 2.8 Para 2: for clarity 


Suggest: "It is expected that features built in these formats will be used instead of HTTP Range Requests."

14. A5: Remove space before full stop in the first sentence.

15. Suggest moving the first data flow diagram in A.5 before the example code that uses equivalent resources. And even splitting A.5. with a subsection for equivalent resource.

BR/Rahul

On Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 at 1:33 PM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:

> Am 22.10.2025 um 09:30 schrieb Rahul Gupta:
> 

> > Hi Mark,
> > 

> > I had few suggestions on the changed language (nothing that would at all affect the progression of the draft, mainly verbosity and repetition) but it completely fell off my radar.
> > ...
> 

> 

> If all of these are editorial, we can just collect them now, and then go
> through them at a later point of time.
> 

> Best regards, Julian