Re: GET on a reference

Judith Slein wrote:

> 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.

But, again, what are the headers of a referential resource? The standard ones
I think might be useful are the cache-related ones (Cache-Control, Age, ETag,
Expires, and Last-Modified), WWW-Authenticate (which would come in a 401, not a
302), and Location; all of those seem to be legal with a 302.

> Do
> those headers come back with a 302 response? (I was assuming not.)

I believe they can.  Today they usually don't (I think); but that's because, in
base HTTP, a 302 comes from server configuration, not from the requested
resource, so there's no cache-related information available.

> 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.)

My fear is that, if we do that, then we'll have people editing foo.ref with
existing tools, and accidentally PUTting it back to foo.ref rather than the
target resource.  You'd want to do that sometimes, of course, but it seems like
it'd be less common than wanting to PUT back to the target resource--and you
can always DELETE foo.ref and then PUT on top of it anyway.

--
/====================================================================\
|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.)                                |
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Received on Tuesday, 30 June 1998 16:51:45 UTC