Re: DELETE in WebDAV Collections

"Slein, Judith A" wrote:

> Then what's left is the case where a client really wants to remove the state
> from the Web by removing all the resources and all the bindings that provide
> access to it.  Do we need to define a method for this

I believe we don't--or, at least, we shouldn't.  The problem with this sort of
method is that the client doesn't know what the persistent state is.  For
example, suppose you have a server that stores XML documents and autogenerates
HTML, text/plain, or PDF on request.  Suppose further that it's all-or-nothing:
the server has no way to say, "stop autogenerating HTML for this document".
Then the only way to destroy the persistent state of a PDF resource is to
delete the underlying XML document.  This is something that the user may want
to do, but they should be required to do it explicitly (by chasing down the
DAV:source property and deleting the XML resource); otherwise they'll be caught
by surprise when they decide to clean up all their PDF documents to save disk
space.  :-)

--
/=============================================================\
|John Stracke    | My opinions are my own | S/MIME & HTML OK  |
|francis@ecal.com|============================================|
|Chief Scientist | NT's lack of reliability is only surpassed |
|eCal Corp.      |  by its lack of scalability. -- John Kirch |
\=============================================================/

Received on Monday, 26 April 1999 11:40:20 UTC