Re: WebDAV Bindings - Issue Yaron.BindSyntax

>It was actually initially written so that it asked for the creation of a
>binding at the Request-URI to the resource identified by the Destination
>header.  The rationale for this was that it seemed more intuitive to have
>the syntax of the request reflect the natural-language request: Create a
>binding from this segment to this resource.  (Anyhow, that's how the spec
>always expresses the request in English.)  And it seems as if the
>Request-URI should identify the resource for which authorization would be
>required to fulfill the request.  It's the collection where the binding
>lives that gets modified, and so update permission would be needed on that
>collection, and so that collection should be identified by the Request-URI.

Yep, that's what it should be.  Not only does the request-URI indicate
the point of modification, it also determines the mechanism within the
server responsible for handling that namespace -- something which absolutely
must be done *before* interpreting the method (except for TRACE).

>We changed this to be consistent with the usage in COPY and MOVE, thinking
>that it would be too confusing otherwise.  And servers would have to
>interpret the Overwrite header differently for BIND than for COPY / MOVE if
>we used the Request-URI and the Destination header differently than COPY /
>MOVE.

Oh, shoot me.  For some lame reason I missed that when WebDAV went up
for review, since the semantics in HTTP have always been that the
request-URI represents the target of the modification, for the same
reason that most assembler languages use the first operand as the
destination.

I'd prefer it be done the natural way rather than being consistent with
COPY and MOVE.

....Roy

Received on Thursday, 20 January 2000 18:39:25 UTC