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

Thanks, maybe I'm finally starting to get this stuff!  Seriously, I've 
always thought the 2616 explanation of PUT doesn't fit with the 
distinction I've understood between representation and resource.  Not sure 
whether it's within the TAG's purview to clean up IETF publications, but 
clarification of PUT and its implications might be something for the TAG 
to consider.  Thanks again.

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Noah Mendelsohn                              Voice: 1-617-693-4036
IBM Corporation                                Fax: 1-617-693-8676
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Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
05/07/03 06:19 PM

 
        To:     noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com
        cc:     Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, www-tag@w3.org
        Subject:        Re: Draft  TAG finding available: Client handling of MIME headers


noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com wrote:

>   If I'm right, then the analysis is a bit trickier 
> than I've seen so far in this discussion.  I start by setting out my 
> admittedly imperfect understanding of the pertinent web architecture, 
then 
> suggest the answer to the question above.

Noah, I think your analysis is correct.  The server is certainly not 
constrained by Web Architecture to send back the same representation 
that got PUT, nor to use the same media-type, charset, etc.  However, 
when the server does whatever it does with the representation that got 
PUT, it is *not* OK to ignore the accompanying media-type and interpose 
its own guess.  In this case, what the server does is store the 
representation as a bag of bits and emit it later on demand (a simple 
and common case) and it illustrates perfectly the problems that arise 
when web agents ignore the authoritative status of the media-type. -Tim

Received on Wednesday, 7 May 2003 22:06:58 UTC