- From: John Stracke <francis@netscape.com>
- Date: Tue, 07 Jul 1998 11:34:19 -0700
- To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
Judith Slein wrote: > I guess the issue is how detailed the specification of the response entity > should be. Ideally, the response entity will be irrelevant; the Location: header will suffice. The HTTP requirement is there because there are browsers that don't grok Location:; such browsers will instead display the HTML they get. These are mostly extremely *old* browsers (pre-HTTP/1.0); there may be a few that support PUT, and a few of those may still in use, but it would be surprising. Besides, those few certainly won't care if the response is well-formed XML or not. :-) > The response to a PUT is a more difficult case. A DAV-aware client would > probably not have tried to do a PUT to a referential resource in the first > place. Mmm, I'm not sure. I can think of a few plausible scenarios right off the bat: 1. The client is PUTting a new document, and has never interacted with this resource before. 2. The client is PUTting an edited document; the resource was nonreferential before, but another client (or an admin) has changed it in the meantime. 3. The client's developers, mindful of scenario 2, did not assume that referentiality was indefinitely cachable, and so built their client to PUT to the reference to see if it was still a reference. > For a non-DAV client, the entity of the response should present the > user with a choice between replacing the target resource and replacing the > reference. And that's exactly what a compliant HTTP/1.1 client will do in response to a 302: If the 302 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued. -- /====================================================================\ |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 Tuesday, 7 July 1998 14:34:55 UTC