- From: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 22:52:16 +0200
- To: Lisa Dusseault <lisa@osafoundation.org>
- CC: Geoffrey M Clemm <geoffrey.clemm@us.ibm.com>, webdav <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
Lisa Dusseault wrote: > > >> It's a bit unclear to me what exactly your point is. Yes, server >> admins can already author redirects, so there are other ways to create >> these redirects than HTTP. The same could be said about WebDAV, so why >> did we bother defining that? >> > > Because there was a clear need for client interoperability in the > general case of authoring Web content: several volunteer editors each > from different possible implementors, several other participants who > were also implementors. It wasn't a large community of implementors > (not compared to other WGs I've participated in, like SIP) but it was > large enough to make the work not only clearly useful but also validated > by more than one implementation model and by a set of use cases that > mattered to more than one implementation. I think there is clearly a need for discovery of redirects, that is clarifications about the relation between redirects and WebDAV's extensions. Today, the behaviour of servers that have redirects inside WebDAV collections is unspecified, and clients *do* expose strange behaviour because of that. Of course we can argue about whether we need a standard protocol to *author* redirects. At the end of the day, the question should be "is this harmful?" or "is it useful?". IMHO it's not harmful at all, because nobody is forced to implement it. But it is certainly useful, because it gives implementors a well-defined protocol that they *can* implement instead of coming up with proprietary extensions. So is the lack of server support for HTTP-authorable redirects caused by the fact nobody needs it, or is it simply because implementors actually wait for this WG to actually finish and publish the spec? Best regards, Julian
Received on Thursday, 16 June 2005 20:52:30 UTC