Re: REST and DELETE?

On 10 Aug 2012, at 19:11, "Eric J. Bowman" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Mark Baker wrote:
>> 
>> Mike Kelly wrote:
>>> Does it _have_ to contain all the state? The following would work
>>> ok, and the important parts of the interaction are still visible:
>>> 
>>> POST /cart/123
>>> If-Match: 2930480293842
>>> <state>reserve-to-pay</state>
>> 
>> It has to contain all the state if you want the message to reflect the
>> intent of the user, yes.  That message is not self-descriptive.
>> 
> 
> +1
> 
> I don't recognize the media type, therefore not self-descriptive.

What part of the dissertation are you claiming this request would be entirely non self-descriptive?

If youre being pedantic because I omitted Content-Type: application/xml then please lets just pretend that was included in the example.. Still not self-descriptive?

It is self-descriptive to an extent: it's a non-safe request to the cart resource to process the message in some way, it's a cache-invalidating request. Interestingly, the last bit of self-description is not actually present in Mark's example.

If you want to argue for superior self-descriptiveness, you need to explain why the additional visibility you are creating will enable otherwise-impossible intermediary mechanisms. Otherwise you should be arguing some other system property than self-descriptiveness.

It seems to me like there is not a clear enough definition of "self-descriptive" and/or visibility. And this results in it being used as a go-to argument for anyone that prefers a long winded, verbose design approach. Which is a shame.

Cheers,
M