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Re: Number of methods.

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Number of methods.
• From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
• Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2002 09:09:06 -0500
• In-reply-to: <3C63B080.3E4A696D@p...>
• Organization: Red Bridge Interactive, Inc.
• References: <D7155AD41ECFD511AF4A00B0D0202CB51DFD55@MAILHOST> <E16Z2zg-0005Hy-00@s...> <3C63B080.3E4A696D@p...>

On Friday 08 February 2002 06:03 am, Paul Prescod wrote:
> > FWIW. I wrote a distirbuted hypermedia/collaborative system back
> > in the late 80's where everything used s-expressions. That system
> > only had GET, SET and CALL... DELETE was  (set foo nil)....
>
> You can certainly build a distributed system in the manner you did.
> But I would suggest that DELETE is useful because HTTP does not try
> to interpret your message content. It reserves the message body
> entirely for the application. You were *building* an application so
> you made a different decision.

Oh I agree. DELETE is useful... overloading SET was a bit of a kludge. 
I was just pointing out that you need very little to do a lot... the 
trick in the applications use of the protocol, not the protocol itself.

> Unlike newer specs, most of that complexity was added by or in
> consultation with, implementors, as they were implementing, to solve
> problems they found in implementation.

I'd go back and review this though... things like content negotiation 
could arguably be eliminated, or at least trimmed down a bit. HTTP 1.1 
is not a simple protocol.... and some parts were added without much 
thought (like Accept-Charset ;-))

> We're not going to get back into "what is HTTP for?" are we? ;)

No. My feeling is that the *model* you're espousing could be built on 
a cleaner substrate. That's my opinion, just as it's *your* opinion 
that HTTP is all you need.

• References:
  • RE: Categories of Web Service messages: data-oriented v
    • From: Michael Brennan <Michael_Brennan@A...>
  • Re: Categories of Web Service messages: data-oriented v
    • From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
  • Number of methods.
    • From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>

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