Trailing "/" in BIND Requests

Both Yaron and Jim Amsden our attempts to enforce consistency between the
Request-URI and the Destination header in BIND requests are not appropriate.
We wanted to say that either both must end in a "/" or neither may end in a
"/".  

But in reality a trailing "/" is not a reliable indicator of the type of
resource being addressed, so we should allow servers to process BIND
requests even if the Request-URI ends in "/" and the Destination header does
not, or vice versa.

We agree with these comments and will remove the constraints from the
description of the BIND method and the related examples.

Yaron also objected to our saying that the Request-URI cannot just consist
of "/".  That is, we currently say that you cannot use BIND to create a
binding between the root and some resource.  We say this because we define a
binding to be a relation between a URI segment in its parent collection and
some resource.  That is, it's the triple (segment, collection, resource).
Here there is no segment, and there is no parent collection.  So you can't
make sense of creating a binding for "/". 

--Judy

Judith A. Slein
Xerox Corporation
jslein@crt.xerox.com
(716)422-5169
800 Phillips Road 105/50C
Webster, NY 14580

Received on Wednesday, 15 September 1999 14:53:25 UTC