Re: Partial Puts

>Clients who make small changes to resources do not wish to have to
>upload an entire entity. As such, some sort of partial write capability
>is needed.

I've been waiting for this topic to appear in this list. I propose VTML  as
an interchange language for the description of partial resources. VTML is
more general than the method proposed by Yaron, and can accomodate many
more types of operations besides INSERTions and OVERWRITEs

Furthermore, and I think this is particularly important, it does not add to
the "methoditis" and "headeritis" that recent proposals suffer from.
Following the content-type vs. headers discussion of this week, I believe
that a complex issue such as partial resource description can not be
accomodated with a few methods and headers, but a specific content-type
needs to be introduced. I believe VTML fits the bill.

Since its first proposal at the IV WWW Conference, VTML has added the
possibility of using new user-defined change operations, and has become
independent of the data type it describes versions of. This means that VTML
is not only good for HTML any more, but can be considered for arbitrary
(including binary) data types.

You can find the most recent proposal for VTML at:

http://www.cs.unibo.it/~fabio/bio/Working/Versioning/VTML.html

Fabio

Received on Friday, 21 March 1997 09:03:06 UTC