Someone might consider putting this question to the people doing the 2616bis update to HTTP. See http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/httpbis-charter.html - there is a mailing list.
As I understand it, part of their charter is to clarify some of the murkier pieces of the spec; this sounds like it might be one of those places. --Chuck On Jan 14, 2008 10:50 AM, Rob Heittman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > My interpretation of the spec is that an entity is required for a PUT > > I always thought so, but couldn't find a clear citation thereof, which > surprises me greatly. This kind of contravenes one of my core understanding > about what "existence" means for a resource. If anyone is in conversational > contact with any of the HTTP/1.1 authors, I'd be academically interested in > their intent on this point! > > In reality, I think the issue is that lots of implementors and > implementations have interpreted it the same way as Restlet, so for all > intents and purposes it's probably a bad idea to introduce an API that > relies on PUT of empty entities. > > Rhett, I looked back at some of our projects using this design and found > that in all cases the link attributes are /important./ So maybe if you > define the entity body as containing a list of link attributes (which may be > empty for now; <link-attributes/>) you may find that instead of being an ad > hoc workaround, this is a good forward-looking step for future evolution of > your solution. Unless your understanding of the problem domain indicates > that there will never be any attributes associated with such a linkage. > > - Rob > >
