Re: Restoring PUT and DELETE

On 2011-12-01 12:03, Cameron Heavon-Jones wrote:
> Hi Yehuda\Mike\Juilan,
>
> Its good to get back to this issue, hope it keeps the traction this time :)
>
> Without going into too much detail yet, there were two points from the
> last discussions to be highlighted at this point.
>
> The first is with regards to browser handling of responses. I did some
> thorough testing of the current state of play of browser behaviour in
> this area and found that browsers are on the whole up to spec with their
> behaviour and that the default for content responses is to render
> whatever payload is returned. I have a matrix of these responses which
> can be added to any docs [attached].

That's awesome. I might have some more questions later, but it would be 
really cool if you could add tests for 299 and 399 (testing for new 
status codes in existing ranges).

> While performing the browser tests however, i started to doubt the
> necessity of such tests - perhaps this is a more methodological
> question, but is the html specification the place for defining http
> behaviour?

It's at the intersection between HTML and HTTP. I think it needs to be 
specified *somewhere*, as it affects:

- the ability to introduce new status codes and get them processed by 
UAs (think 
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-nottingham-http-new-status-02.html#rfc.section.6>),

- what we can respond to HTTP requests generated by forms, and also

- how we can deploy new authentication schemes.

> The other issue is that specifications for PUT and DELETE are not too
> held back with conformance for current server implementations. As new
> functionality to html and hence requiring to be explicitly added by
> authors there should not be any backward compatibility to break.

Yes, but then what browsers do with PUT and DELETE (and maybe other 
methods) should work well with what servers already implement; it would 
be bad if they would have to special-case their responses for "browsers".

Best regards, Julian

Received on Thursday, 1 December 2011 12:09:38 UTC