- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 08:40:52 -0400
- To: wangxiao@musc.edu
- Cc: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>, Phil Archer <parcher@icra.org>, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, "Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)" <skw@hp.com>, "www-tag@w3.org WG" <www-tag@w3.org>
Xiaoshu Wang writes: > HTTP protocol is a transportation protocol. > Hence, the semantics of HTTP should be ALL about delivering > message and its parsing and it should have nothing to do with > judging its content. Hmm. I would have said that HTTP is an application-level protocol. Otherwise, why distinguish PUT from POST or DELETE? What they transport isn't much different, except that with delete there is seldom need for much information beyond the identifier of the resource. If it were just a transportation protocol, then all we would need is well typed messages, and we could encode operations in those messages if we wished to. I'm not sure I'd use your phrase "judging its content", but HTTP operations are applied to Web resources, and the status codes properly reflect information about that interaction. The fact that certain operations cannot be successfully performed on certain classes of resources, and that the status codes therefore (if properly used) allow one at times to infer information about the nature of the resources, all seem fine to me. If we were talking about TCP, I would for the most part agree with you. Noah -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Friday, 11 April 2008 12:40:49 UTC