Re: Bindings and Locks (was: bind draft issues)

On Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 11:55  AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
> Again, quoting Geoff quoting RFC2616:
>
>> In case there remains any question about whether HTTP supports
>> multiple URIs being mapped to the same resource, the following quote
>> appears in section 9.6 of RFC-2616:
>>
>> "A single resource MAY be identified by many different URIs. For
>> example, an article might have a URI for identifying "the current
>> version" which is separate from the URI identifying each
>> particular version. In this case, a PUT request on a general URI
>> might result in several other URIs being defined by the origin
>> server."

Julian,

It doesn't follow from above that HTTP must have bindings as
they are specified in the binding document (and GULP).  One can
imagine a number of scenarios where there are multiple
URIs for a resource that have quite different semantics and
behavior.

In fact, it's easy to imagine a different binding draft
that specifies, for instance, soft links.  This binding
draft would be perfectly consistent with both HTTP and
WebDAV, but would behave very differently from the
current draft.  In fact, implementations which are built
directly on top of unix file systems might prefer that
draft to the current draft.  Are there good reasons to
prevent other binding models by forcing the binding
model of the current bind draft into WebDAV?

Especially given our lack of experience with deploying
bindings, I'd prefer WebDAV to be agnostic for the time
being.  Let's face it, file systems find a need to
support different binding models, so it's plausible
that WebDAV might find this need as well.

-brian
briank@xythos.com

Received on Wednesday, 5 March 2003 17:25:27 UTC