RE: FW: LC Comments: Web Method Feature

> > > 
> > > It isn't GETtable.  It's non-idempotent.
> > 
> > GET mailto:mike@dataconcert.com HTTP/1.1
> > Host: magic.httpserver.net
> > User-Agent: not-your-fathers-browser
> > Authentication: BASIC YA4H8G==
> > Accept: text/xml; message/rfc822; text/plain
> 
> Sorry to be stupid, but does this do anything useful?
> 
> By its nature, as far as I can parse it, a mailto URL is 
> going to indicate a state-changing, non-idempotent action, 
> and thus isn't appropriate for a GET.  For that matter, I 
> don't quite understand how one would 'get' a mailto ....  But 
> you've produced an example, what does it mean?
> 
It just means that the URI can be used in an HTTP GET situation.
The mailto: scheme isn't all that descriptive of the resources on a mail
server that a client can interact with.
This was sort of a forced example to try to show that URI are only
identifiers and even though 'mailto' sounds (to a human) like a directional
action, it isn't. 

So, from a URI point of view, a mailto URI isn't an 'action'. It identifies
a resource that can be interacted with via SMTP, IMAP, POP3. You can talk
/about/ the resource in other contexts by referencing the resource with
mailto: also, which is a secondary purpose of identifiers in addition to
direct interaction.

But this is stretching things because of the history of mailto: - it'd be
nice to have a more clearly defined mail: or mailbox: or im: URI scheme that
provided the naming of resources for complete, rich 'Web automatable'
access.

mike

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2002 14:54:23 UTC