Re: GET on a reference

At 03:19 PM 6/29/98 PDT, Jim Davis wrote:
>At 08:22 AM 6/29/98 PDT, Judith Slein wrote:
>>I agree that this is the direction the discussion in Redmond seemed to be
>>pointing.
>
>>There is a requirement (3.1.4) that operations on a referential member not
>>affect the resource it references.... If requests were automatically
>redirected to its target resource,
>>this would not be possible.
>
>There is nothing automatic about the 302 response.  A client can decide
>whether to chase the link or not.  And so what if it is automatic?  By
>hypothesis, the client does not understand DAV, so there's no choice it can
>make.  Is there any operation that John's proposal makes impossible?  I
>think not.

I was not assuming that the client doesn't understand DAV.  A client that
does understand DAV may have occasion to do a GET or HEAD on a referential
resource in order to see the headers for the referential resource.  Do
those headers come back with a 302 response? (I was assuming not.)  If not,
then how does the client ever get access to them?

>
>>Similarly for PUT, the client might be wanting to replace the content of
>>the target resource, but on the other hand it might be wanting to replace
>>the reference with an ordinary resource that has content. 
>
>I don't think John proposed that a PUT do redirection.  Don't we already
>say that PUT on a referential resource is an error, just as PUT on a
>collection is an error?

At the moment the spec says that the referential resource will be replaced
by whatever was in the PUT.  (That is, it will not be redirected, and it
will not fail.)

>
>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?)
> 
>I see nothing to object to in John's proposal.
>
>
>
Name:			Judith A. Slein
E-Mail:		slein@wrc.xerox.com
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Received on Tuesday, 30 June 1998 09:43:06 UTC