Re: Seiwald Q & A -- "GET for EDIT" cookies

I'm responding to a bunch of messages, all about cookies.

1. What about Content-Version and Derived-From? (Dan Connolly)  

	If I read the spec right, Content-Version reflects the contents
	of the document.  That is, if the same document is dished up
	twice it is supposed to have the same Content-Version value.

	As I argued before (and will continue arguing until I wear people
	down :-) the identity of the source is not sufficient information
	for a "checkin", because the VC system underneath the version-aware
	web server may wish to find any context associated with a prior
	"checkout".  

	Now Roy Fielding says that Content-Version is opaque and could
	be used exactly for this purpose, 'cause no one would be the wiser
	if the Content-Version were different for each checkout of the
	same document.  This is true, but now the names of these fields
	are losing their meaning, no?  If it's checkout context, call it
	"Checkout-Context" (or "Checkout-Cookie").

2. Let's put the cookie in a <META> tag.  (Murray Maloney)

	Then we can't version things other than HTML, right?

3. Appeals that this doesn't belong in a standard: 

   | Some systems may want to use cookies, others may want to just do a redirect 
   | with a URL extension. However my concern isn't that tokens may be needed 
   | but rather that we are over specifying. We need to be careful about not 
   | throwing in the kitchen sink. In this case there are clearly systems which 
   | may need token support but they can use the already existing cookie 
   | standards to handle this. As such there is no need to explicitly mention 
   | said support in the versioning standard. Small is beautiful when it comes 
   | to standards.
   | 					Yaron

	I totally agree with "small is beatiful."  As far as I know,
	there is no field which can carry the checkout context token.
	As far as I can see, this is the most important token to carry.
	Chuck everything else.

4. David Durand's 3-checkout scenario.

	Dead-on.

	The intent is not to support directly all these weirdo scenarios,
	but rather with a single swipe support all VC systems in their
	various context-heavy or context-light ways.

Christopher

Received on Tuesday, 3 September 1996 13:29:37 UTC