RE: Why IE's Web Folders are accessed through File/Open

Great e-mail. Shows what the real world is like.
We ran into that Noun/Verb issue with URLs and what we decided to do
(because we are a small company) for our Web apps was to standardize on a
URL parameter for the 'verb' portion. Conceptually, we bubbled up some HTTP
headers into the query term of a URL. So to specify the 'method' we use
?do:method=options and such. In addition, we also use do:accept and
do:authorization to emulate the 'Accept' and 'Authorization' headers.
This makes is a little easier to author HTML pages with more control of what
happens on the server & makes it easier to pass around URLs with known
results (even between clients, since it's all server side).

Mike
PS
The handling of do:method=options actually combines the HTTP Method and the
do:method - you end up with 'get_options' or 'post_options', but it could be
done differently, that's a minor issue compared with how you actually
formalize the request.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Yaron Goland [mailto:yarong@Exchange.Microsoft.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 5:08 PM
> To: 'Joe Orton'; w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> Subject: Why IE's Web Folders are accessed through File/Open
> 
> 
> O.k., I admit it, I am the person responsible for the awful 
> file/open check
> box UI in Web Folders in IE. It is all my fault. Throw rotten 
> tomatoes my
> way.
> 
> All of us at MS tried to come up with a better solution. The 
> ways to improve
> Web Folders in IE fell into two types - 
> 1) Enable people, only by typing in a URL to tell the system 
> that they want
> a PROPFIND view
> 2) Put in a switch to allow people, once they are at a site, 
> to flip between
> GET/PROPFIND
> 
> We were, unfortunately, not able to achieve either of these 
> goals for the
> reasons I will outline below. This is why we ended up with 
> the file/open UI.
> It was the best thing we could come up with. 
>

Received on Thursday, 3 February 2000 11:35:53 UTC