Re: Thoughts on relation to WebDAV

Hi,

The omission of a MUST or REQUIRED statement for MKCOL itself was  
unintentional as far as I can remember.  There was certainly no intent  
to make MKCOL optional -- I think that other sections, luckily, make  
that obvious even if it's not explicit.

BTW, I like summary sections that list every major feature which is  
required to be implemented, and every major feature that is optional  
-- they make it easy to ensure that the document is clear about every  
feature.  We did that in  CalDAV <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4791#section-2 
 >.

If I entered an errata I could probably also approve it as document  
author AND as AD, but that might be in bad taste.

I appreciate your injunction to take Internet standards more  
seriously, but I'm afraid you really are preaching to the choir!

Thanks,
Lisa

On May 23, 2008, at 1:56 PM, Werner Baumann wrote:

>
> Julian Reschke wrote:
> > There are many ways how a server can refuse to do MKCOL. It can
> > always claim "forbidden", it can say "not implemented" etc.
> >
> > In practice it means the client won't be able to create collections.
>
> So we need only two status codes in HTTP: success, no success.
> Ever occurred to you, that an error code should inform about the  
> reason of the failure and that this reason makes a difference in  
> practice?
>
> 403 says, the server can create collections, but it will not create  
> *this* collection.
> 501 says, the server is not able to create collections at all.
>
> Can't you imagine, that clients and users might react differently in  
> this two cases? Never seen a windows-user, completely mixing up the  
> system configuration, just because of an idiotic, misleading error  
> message?
>
>
> RFC 4918 has silently removed the requirement for servers to support  
> MKCOL. This (together with compliance class 3) has lead to confusion  
> (see this thread). But it does not matter in practice?
> Will it not effect the development of clients, whether they can  
> trust in support of MKCOL by all compliant servers? They can always  
> decide to not support badly broken servers, but they can hardly  
> explain why they will not support compliant ones.
> If you buy a WebDAV-server from a vendor and later notice it does  
> not support MKCOL. Does it matter whether this is standard compliant?
>
> Was the requirement for supporting MKCOL removed by intention or by  
> an editorial mistake. RFC 4918 lists three contributors and one  
> author. One of them (Julian Reschke) says "It wasn't intentional".  
> There is an Errata document with three entries, all by Julian  
> Reschke. But unintentional removal of a WebDAV-method from the  
> requirements is not worth an entry in Errata, because it does not  
> matter in practice.
>
> I believe internet standards should be taken more seriously.
>
> Werner
>