RE: Protocol Design: new XML elements in the body or new headers?

> Many of the new methods being defined for WebDAV versioning have
> an XML document as the value of their request and/or response body.
> While designing the protocol, I am continually faced with the question:
>
> Should an input parameter to the method be represented as a new XML
> element in the request body or as a new request header?  Similarly,
> should an output parameter to the method be represented as a new XML
> element in the response body or as a new respose header?

I discussed some of these marshalling issues in a workshop paper I wrote for
the HTTP Future workshop held at WWW7 last year -- it complements Yaron's
header/body rationale post. The paper is titled, "Lessons from WebDAV for
the Next Generation Web Infrastructure", and covers the topics of parameter
marshalling, multi-resource operations, operations on resource hierarchies,
status reporting, and built-in lock support.  The paper was written to try
and separate out the "take-home" lessons from WebDAV which would be of
interest to future protocol authors, specifically for HTTP-NG.

The position paper is available at:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/http-future/whitehead/http_pos_paper.html

- Jim

Received on Monday, 18 January 1999 20:30:13 UTC