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

Mark Baker writes:

> But the bulk of the use of PUT is with DAV, and DAV
> uses it to mean "store".  Unfortunately, it's
> problematic to have it mean "store" and "set" at the
> same time on the public Web, as there's no way for a
> PUT message with "set" intent to be distinguished from
> one with "store" intent, and "set" is incompatible with
> "store" (as it's more general, not less).  If it were
> the other way around, and "set" semantics were
> commonplace, then there would be no issue.  Or, if HTTP
> had mandatory extensions, then I could use PUT with
> "set" intent without confusing components that only
> knew about "store".

I don't see the situation as being this difficult.  If I understand Roy, 
the owner of the resource gets to decide on the nature of that resource, 
what sort of state it accepts and stores, and how it deals with that state 
over time.  Why not describe the situation this way:

"DAV is commonly used in conjunction with resources that have as their 
semantic to store and faithfully return the pair {contentType, 
octetStream}.   Users of DAV applications that expect such behavior would 
do well not to use their applications in conjunction with resources that 
have different behavior."

Julian Reschke writes:

> Well, RFC2518 is silent about that. Indeed most uses of
> WebDAV *currently* are basically network filesystems,
> but there already examples to the contrary (for
> instance, there are servers that do not persist the
> octet stream but the XML infoset of XML entities, thus
> do not round-trip things like whitespace within tags or
> attribute quotation styles). This is a perfectly legal
> implementation of PUT and is both in line with HTTP and
> WebDAV (in fact, WebDAV doesn't say anything particular
> about PUT).

Exactly.  I think this is consistent with just the interpretation I 
suggest above.

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Noah Mendelsohn                              Voice: 1-617-693-4036
IBM Corporation                                Fax: 1-617-693-8676
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Received on Thursday, 8 May 2003 15:10:52 UTC