Re: GET on a reference

Jim Davis wrote:

> I don't think John proposed that a PUT do redirection.

Mmm...<dig, dig>...yeah, actually, I did; I proposed it for GET, HEAD, PUT, &
POST.  But now I'm not sure.

> Don't we already
> say that PUT on a referential resource is an error,

OK, so why is it an error? If it's just because we think that PUTting onto a
reference instead of the target is a Bad Thing, then we can return 302 instead
of an error code, and then the client will PUT onto its target.  Or do we have
some deeper reason?

Of course, if someone really wants to PUT an entity where the reference is,
they can do a DELETE first.

> It's not even clear to me it would do anything.  (e.g, if you do a PUT with
> Netscape and it gets a 302 response does it retry the PUT at the new URL?)

Well, according to HTTP/1.1, it's not supposed to, without checking with the
user.  Let me try it out, though...yes, it does (admittedly, we don't actually
do HTTP/1.1, and /1.0 doesn't warn against this behavior; it doesn't define
PUT).

--
/====================================================================\
|John (Francis) Stracke    |My opinions are my own.|S/MIME supported |
|Software Retrophrenologist|=========================================|
|Netscape Comm. Corp.      | Cogito ergo Spud.  (I think, therefore  |
|francis@netscape.com      |  I yam.)                                |
\====================================================================/
New area code for work number: 650

Received on Monday, 29 June 1998 18:49:14 UTC