- From: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 02:27:14 +0100
- To: "Lisa Dusseault" <lisa@xythos.com>, "'Clemm, Geoff'" <gclemm@rational.com>, "'Webdav WG'" <w3c-dist-auth@w3c.org>
Lisa, I agree with the statement that etags are useful. Etags on their own are useful. ETags in conjunction with locking are even more useful. I doubt anybody disagrees. The issue we've been debating recently whether this justifies to *require* etags. My recent tests with IIS and Apache/Moddav show that upon a PUT, all you get is a weak etag, which clearly demonstrates that it is non-trivial to produce robust etags when your backend is a filesystem. So, IMHO, we really *can't* require strong etags, and weak etags really do not help. So yes, there must be a safe way for a client to discover the server's etag support (supported live properties, allprop, propname and GET/HEAD behaviour MUST match), but that's it. If a client doesn't want to communicate with a resource that doesn't provide strong etags, it certainly can (and should be able) to do so. I think that's all RFC2518bis should say. Julian -- <green/>bytes GmbH -- http://www.greenbytes.de -- tel:+492512807760
Received on Tuesday, 25 February 2003 20:27:51 UTC