Re: Draft TAG finding available: Client handling of MIME headers

At 13:46 03/05/06 -0700, Roy T. Fielding wrote:

>>You make that sound as if persisting type information supplied by a client
>>is incompatible to what the server does today -- and I think this is not the
>>case. Apache/moddav very well could continue to do what it does today, yet
>>persist additional content type data that was sent by the client in it's DAV
>>store.
>
>No, what I said is that assuming webdav is the sole source of such
>information is wrong.  The server config files are just as authoritative
>as an individual PUT request.  If the server config says that a filter
>is applied or metadata assigned based on the storage file name, then
>that is exactly what the server will do.

Hello Roy,

Are you saying that if a file foo.html is put as
      text/html; charset=UTF-8
but the server has a configuration for .html to
use text/html; charset=iso-8859-1, then the correct thing for the
server is to serve that file as text/html; charset=iso-8859-1, even
if that is observably wrong?


>>If a client PUTs a UTF-8 encoded XML document and properly declares both
>>type and encoding, but a subsequent GET returns different (and wrong!)
>>information this really smells like a bug, not a feature.
>
>What the server should do is reject the PUT if the metadata is
>inconsistent with its configuration.

Why shouldn't the server just update the configuration?
Is there anything in the HTTP spec that says that server
configuration is more important than the metadata attached
to a document?

Regards,    Martin.

Received on Tuesday, 6 May 2003 19:08:51 UTC