Re: Proposal: BIND method

Slein, Judith A wrote:
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jim Whitehead [mailto:ejw@ics.uci.edu]
> > Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 1999 8:26 PM
> > To: Geoffrey M. Clemm
> > Cc: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> > Subject: RE: Proposal: BIND method
> >
> >
> > I discussed this with Roy today, and it's his belief that the
> > definition in
> > the HTTP spec. was made assuming that the binding and the
> > resource were
> > indistinguishable, and hence "deleting the resource" in the
> > HTTP spec. can
> > safely be reinterpreted as "remove the binding of the resource to the
> > Request-URI", since a downlevel client would not be able to
> > distinguish
> > between a server following this unlink behavior, or the
> > destroy semantics
> > that are implied by the current definition.
> >
> > Thus I now feel much more comfortable reworking the
> > definition of DELETE in
> > the Advanced Collections specification.
> >
> 
> I have a couple of questions about the consequences of interpreting DELETE
> in advanced collections to mean remove the binding to the request-URI.
> 
> What do HTTP servers currently do when they get a DELETE request?  Remove
> one binding or remove all bindings?

mod_dav implements DELETE for Apache. There is an old mod_put that also
implements DELETE. In both cases, only a single binding is removed.

Depending on the link style, the other bindings may be dangling (a 404
will be returned, but the remaining garbage in the filesystem will cause
other effects like a PUT return 200 rather than 201). For a hard link,
the other bindings will operate normally.

> Would we be asking servers to keep track of which bindings were created with
> BIND and which were created in some other way (say with PUT), and interpret
> DELETE differently depending on how the binding was created?  Or are we

Definitely. There is no way to back-trace a BIND (to deal properly with
them) without the server keeping track of all URIs that were created
with a BIND.

> saying, any URI binding that claims to be compliant with Advanced
> Collections (no matter how that URI binding was created) must interpret
> DELETE as . . .
> 
> If we rework the definition of DELETE, what impact does this have on the
> meaning of MOVE?

Depends on the reworking :-)  John Stracke had some good points here,
tho.

Cheers,
-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/

Received on Monday, 12 April 1999 15:50:02 UTC