- From: WJCarpenter <bill@carpenter.ORG>
- Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 14:58:09 -0700
- To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
jw> ... and while we're at it, let's break the majority of existing
jw> WebDAV clients.
IMHO, WebDAV is not so mature at this point that it is out-of-bounds
to break existing implementations. Of course, what is sufficiently
important for that is a bit subjective. One can see these distinct
groups of implementations today, both in clients and servers:
1. Nobody much using them. (We don't care if they're broken by a
change)
2. Nobody keeping them up. (Many of these are broken in other
interesting ways ... if their creators don't care, why should we?)
3. Actively maintained. (Authors of these will accommodate reasonable
changes. In fact, as others have mentioned from time to time,
they would be happy to rip out implementations of hairy things
even though they have already gone to all the bother of putting it
in in the first place.)
jw> For example, if lock-tokens were removed from the spec., existing clients
jw> that request a lock will be surprised when they do not receive a lock token
jw> back in the response, and will flag an error.
Before I got around to implementing real LOCKs and tokens, I just
returned the same static string for every request. This doesn't cover
all cases and all scenarios, but for a client to object it would
probably have to be correlating multiple LOCK tokens against different
resources, and it would have to care about that.
--
bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP
bill@bubblegum.net 0x91865119
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Received on Monday, 18 October 1999 17:59:02 UTC