Re: Summary of ETag related issues in RFC2518bis

Dan Brotsky wrote:
> Ah, now I begin to understand what I believe is a big misimpression on 
> the part of the server authors.  (Sadly, I see almost no client authors 
> in these discussions anymore, which has been a big part of my problem 
> with the WebDAV process forever and why I've been quiet for so long now.)

Dan, it's good that you're back here. At least Apple and ourselves 
(remember, we also have a client) are following this as well. Of course 
it would be good if Microsoft was around here as well :-).

> Folks, clients are perfectly well aware that servers munge data when 
> they store it.  It's *way* outside the scope of WebDAV to try and match 
> up the server-munging semantics with clients that rely on those 
> semantics.  If you are a client that's looking for a faithful dumb store 
> and you stumble across a CVS-backed webdav server that does keyword 
> expansion to your graphics files, you will figure this out quickly and 
> stop using that server.  That doesn't mean it's not a WebDAV-compliant 
> server, just not one with the store semantics you were expecting.
>  
> Similarly, if you are a client expecting a CVS server and you use a 
> file-backed Apache server, it also won't meet your needs.  But it's 
> still WebDAV-compliant.
>  
> The point of this effort is to define a greatest common denominator that 
> can be divided evenly into the semantics of any server that's called 
> WebDAV compliant.  But believe me, every client in the world understands 
> that there may be extra factors in that server's semantics that are 
> relatively prime with the client's intent!
>  
> That's a good thing.

+1 on that summary.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Wednesday, 21 December 2005 14:57:57 UTC