RE: Some problems with the WebDAV protocol (part 1: philosophy)

> >My belief is that HTTP interoperability testing for PUT and
> >DELETE has been superficial.

What I meant was that while we gave people a chart to fill out
for PUT and DELETE with "No (not implemented), Yes (implemented),
Tested (against two independent implementations)", I'm not sure
exactly what they tested, and whether they tested error cases
and the handling of response codes, and whether there was a clear
matching of expectiations of what the state of the resources might
or might not be after the operations were completed. 

> In the later case, there is plenty examples of HTTP/1.1 working just fine,
> see for example
> 
	http://www.w3.org/WinCom/NoMoreLostUpdates.html

which is fully implemented and supported in libwww, jigsaw, and amaya.

This isn't part of the HTTP/1.1 spec, though. And it requires some amount
of support for etags in association with documents that are being PUT.

You've noted some browsers and servers for which this method works,
but since it isn't in the spec, it's less likely to be widely implemented
and become part of the "standard" for HTTP (to go beyond draft) without
an additional specification.

I don't see a problem with that; I was just trying to point out that
if the webdav group finds out that HTTP is underspecified somewhere,
we could specify it more carefully.

Larry

Received on Monday, 26 April 1999 18:07:09 UTC