- From: Sjoerd Visscher <sjoerd@w3future.com>
- Date: Mon, 09 May 2005 14:23:30 +0200
James Graham wrote: > I should have stated explicitly that when I said "marking the message as > read in some way" I intended that the "some way" could be more than just > changing a message's unread flag, it could be e.g. moving the message > from the inbox to a "Read messages" folder. Even if the message is > "just" marked as read, this can change more than the appearance of the > message - it can change where in the interface it is displayed (in some > sort of virtual-folder based setup), etc. So I don't think you can > dismiss this as "not really a good example of a non-idempotent action" - > it clearly /is/ non-idempotent yet representing the action as a link is > normal and widely understood. > What this shows is that marking a message read when it is retrieved is a bad idea. Retrieving a message must be done with GET, so that it can be cached. Setting the read state should be done seperately with POST. Most e-mail clients only mark an item read when it's open for a few seconds, it's a bonus that you can do that too. -- Sjoerd Visscher http://w3future.com/weblog/
Received on Monday, 9 May 2005 05:23:30 UTC