- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@liege.ICS.UCI.EDU>
- Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 17:19:39 -0700
- To: Christopher Seiwald <seiwald@perforce.com>
- cc: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org, www-vers-wg@ics.uci.edu
> Normally SCM systems have a tight association between the checkout
> context and the checked-out file, because often there is no way to work
> "outside" of the SCM system. But if the SCM system is the backend of
> a version-aware web server, with the actual work happening in "stateless"
> web clients, then that context must be represented by a cookie.
>
> The cookie belongs to the underlying SCM system; whether it is an MD5
> hash of the document contents, some cryptic string churned up from bowels
> of the SCM database, or "allworkandnoplaymakesjohnnyadullboy" is not
> HTTP's or a Web authoring tool's business. They just have to keep it
> associated with the checked-out document so that it can be reunited with
> the checkout context at checkin time.
>
> This cookie is the single most important component of distributed web
> authoring, IMHO.
Hmmm, are you using the general computer meaning of "cookie", or
specifically the Cookie and Set-Cookie mechanisms? The reason I ask
is that the Content-Version and Derived-From fields in earlier
HTTP drafts were intended to carry that information for versioned
resources, and there is no reason why this group cannot complete
their definition for HTTP/1.2 (in fact, that is what I am hoping).
I suppose that Cookie/Set-Cookie could be used, but there are a variety
of concerns (like which cookie, what is its realm, how do you deal with
normal cookie control for privacy, etc.) which would need to be addressed.
...Roy T. Fielding
Department of Information & Computer Science (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-3425 fax:+1(714)824-4056
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/
Received on Thursday, 29 August 1996 20:24:27 UTC