FW: RE: Does zope mess with the body in a GET?

Another message caught by the spam filter.

- Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Lloyd [mailto:Brian@digicool.com]
Sent: Monday, November 15, 1999 11:07 AM
To: 'Jim Davis'
Cc: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
Subject: [Moderator Action] RE: Does zope mess with the body in a GET?


> I did a PUT to foo.html.  I sent 51 characters
> "Despite the name, this is a <B>plain text</B> file."
> 
> when I did a GET I got back 71 characters, 
> 
> "<html><head></head>
> Despite the name, this is a <B>plain text</B> file."
> 
> Looks to me like Zope added those HTML elements for me.  this seems
> undesirable.
> 
> What is also bizarre is that if I do  HEAD, I get back length of 51.
> 
> So I think Zope must be adding them when I do then GET.

It is - this is a documented "feature" from a long time ago in 
Zope's evolution. Because Zope is a pretty dynamic multiprotocol
object environment rather than a simple file server, there are a 
number of similar issues that boil down to an impedence mismatch
between the expectations for dynamic vs. static resources and
(in some cases) the need to maintain b/w compatibility :(

This is especially true regarding "templatish" objects that may 
or may not be thought of as "content" depending on what you are 
doing with them. I suspect that this is also an issue with ASP, PHP,
et. al. too - it would be great to be able to manage these things 
in a standards-based way, but currently DAV is very static-file 
centric in its approach. I'm not knocking that - but it makes 
the practical use of DAV pretty limited on sites that can't get
by on just static files. I've been hoping that we can wrangle 
the time to make some contributions in this area.


> For what it's worth, after the PUT I also did  PROPPATCH to 
> set the type to
> text/plain.
> But that seemed to have no effect
> 

I'll take a look at that. Thanks!


Brian Lloyd        brian@digicool.com
Software Engineer  540.371.6909              
Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com

Received on Monday, 15 November 1999 19:21:26 UTC