Forwarding with permission, as Yaron's offlist.
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Yaron Y. Goland" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: April 12, 2006 9:46:44 AM PDT
To: Mark Nottingham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: Microformats REST <[email protected]>, "Dr.
Ernie Prabhakar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Jim Whitehead
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Larry Masinter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [uf-rest] Roy Fielding on WebDAV and PROPs
Yes, Roy did make those arguments and the group rejected them for
the reasons explained (briefly) in - http://lists.w3.org/Archives/
Public/w3c-dist-auth/1998OctDec/0074.html. (BTW, this is from the
WebDAV Book Of Why which answers lots of questions about why we did
what we did in WebDAV - http://www.webdav.org/papers/).
The interesting question is - now that it's nearly 8 years later
have server processing speeds (and cheap database availability)
increased to the point where using some kind of URL munging would
make sense? I'd argue that you will still need the prop methods for
on-the-wire performance (HTTP never did get box caring right for
non-idempotent methods) but it may indeed be time to add a URL
munging attack (I'm sure Larry will be unhappy) with the
stipulation that the munging only applies to WebDAV resources. I,
for one, certainly always wanted properties to get their own URIs.
Yaron
On Apr 11, 2006, at 4:35 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
Yaron and I used to fight about (er, "discuss") this. Hi, Yaron :)
He and Jim Whitehead wrote a paper about the property design of
WebDAV that explained their requriements and choices; see:
http://www.goland.org/spe-whitehead.pdf
It might be helpful reading.
My preferred way to do this is to turn
PROPFIND /foo
into
GET /foo,properties
where ",properties" is a site-configurable string. It needs to be
advertised by some sort of site metadata; e.g., in OPTIONS *, or
in a response header (although that's arguably a waste of bytes).
There's also the case of getting the properties of multiple
resources, or filtering the properties you get server-side; this
should also be possible, e.g.,
GET/foo,properties;prop1;prop2;depth=infinity
I totally agree with Roy about WebDAV ACLs, but haven't yet seen
any other model come forth.
Cheers,
On 2006/04/11, at 2:32 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
I've always felt there was something wrong with WebDAV, and Roy
did a nice summary of what over on rest-discuss:
On Apr 11, 2006, at 12:40 PM, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
PROP* methods conflict with REST because they prevent
important resources from having URIs and effectively double the
number of methods for no good reason. Both Henrik and I argued
against those methods at the time. It really doesn't matter
how uniform they are because they break other aspects of the
overall model, leading to further complications in versioning
(WebDAV versioning is hopelessly complicated), access control
(WebDAV ACLs are completely wrong for HTTP), and just about every
other extension to WebDAV that has been proposed.
The interesting question for me is what the "right" way to do
properties would be over HTTP. I presume it would require some
sort of convention for a property namespace, which implies non-
opaque URLs. Which in term (in order to be RESTful) would
require the *server* to have some way to tell clients about it,
since clients shouldn't *assume* URI structure.
Any thoughts about the optimal way to do that?
-- Ernie P.
_______________________________________________
microformats-rest mailing list
[email protected]
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-rest
--
Mark Nottingham
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Mark Nottingham
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________
microformats-rest mailing list
[email protected]
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-rest
