- From: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
- Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 14:07:52 -0700
- To: "Dan Brickley" <danbri@w3.org>
- Cc: "Mark Nottingham" <mnot@mnot.net>, "Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>, <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>, "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@w3.org>
> one might grumble about, but all that aside much the same argument can be > run for 'classic' (CGI etc) Web services, ie. those that take a bunch > of HTML-form POSTed parameters and return a (typically HTML or now XML) Actually, it *is* the exact same argument. That is exactly what I was talking about -- POST abuse. POST abuse hides the resources behind an opaque gateway that makes it impossible to identify anyone but the gatekeeper. And people get confused and start using the name of the gatekeeper to identify the resources, since "it's the only endpoint we have that we can talk to". POST abuse severely erodes the value of URIs as identifiers, and taken to the extreme makes URIs useless. Like I said, we all agree that people do it; I am just saying that we should acknowledge that there are people who really hate the fact and want to make it end. P.S. Some would see SOAP as a way to segment things more cleanly between "gatekeeper traffic" and "resource representation traffic", in an attempt to reverse the erosion of URI sanctity. That is, today it is impossible to guess whether a use of POST is "proper" or not. At least SOAP makes it very clear that the message is not a "normal" POST, and therefore all SOAP endpoints can be regarded as suspect. And SOAP provides a path of evolution that could lead to all of the RPC abuses of POST moving away from POST altogether. -J
Received on Wednesday, 10 April 2002 17:08:26 UTC