- From: <hallam@ai.mit.edu>
- Date: Thu, 05 Sep 96 17:31:52 -0400
- To: ejw@ics.uci.edu, w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
- Cc: hallam@ai.mit.edu
There is a substantial disadvantage in not supplying MOVE in addition to COPY and DELETE. It forces servers to perform a copy operation when a much cheaper directory operation may be possible. I see no reason why sending a MOVE operation to the source location of a URI should not cause that server to do a POST of the information to the new location and delete it locally. This would indicate that the method should act on the source URI rather than the target. ie to move a file from http://etna/foo to http://etna/bar I send etna the message MOVE http://etna/foo http/1.2 Destination-URI: http://etna/bar Which could equally be :- MOVE http://etna/foo http/1.2 Destination-URI: http://krakatoa/bar This has the substantial advantage that the machine that holds the data can wait until receiving the 2xx OK response before performing the local delete, also the command would not be permitted unless the user had delete as well as copy permission. If Destination-URI were a list of URIs one could instruct a server to perform a "multimove", ie distribute a document to multiple destinations. This could be very usefull if integrating to e-mail. One can request that a server perform a document distribution task :- COPY http://etna/foo http/1.2 Destination-URI: mailto:hallam@ai.mit.edu mailto:ejw@ics.uci.edu http://etna/bar I think that the command operating on multiple sources is much less usefull. I don't think that the entity compartment should be utilized for specifying the source or destination. It seems to me that this would be better used to put a comment on the reason for the operation. Phill
Received on Thursday, 5 September 1996 17:28:01 UTC