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

> From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of
> Roy T. Fielding
> Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2003 10:47 PM
> To: Julian Reschke
> Cc: www-tag@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Draft TAG finding available: Client handling of MIME
> headers
>
>
>
> > 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

Are they? What's the architectural reason to say that MIME header sent by
servers are authorative, while those sent by clients aren't?

> is applied or metadata assigned based on the storage file name, then
> that is exactly what the server will do.
>
> > 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.  Whether or not mod_dav will do

Could you please elaborate? In this case, what would be the expected
behaviour when I PUT with a content type unknown to the server? Reject it?

> that any time soon depends a great deal on whether or not webdav clients
> ever get around to implementing according to the specification rather
> than according to whatever Microsoft feels like releasing.  When that
> happens, folks concerned about metadata consistency will send in the
> patches required to have mod_dav maintain that consistency.

No fingerpointing please. Microsoft's webfolder client doesn't send proper
content types, but MS IIS *does* persist content types upon PUT.

Julian

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Received on Tuesday, 6 May 2003 19:45:02 UTC