Re: We need to start talking about group and public annotations

Brian Behlendorf (brian@wired.com)
Wed, 20 Jul 1994 22:47:20 +0200

On Wed, 20 Jul 1994, Ian Cooper wrote:
> According to my copy of the HTTP Internet draft (5 Nov 1993 - so may be out
> of date by now),
> "POST and REPLY should be used for creating new documents"
>
> (Couldn't find any information on REPLY :-(
>
> Shouldn't we be looking at POST and REPLY???

According to http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/Methods.html:

>PUT
> specifies that the data in the body section is to be stored under the
> supplied URL. The URL must already exist. The new contenst of
> the document are the data part of the request. POST and REPLY
> should be used for creating new documents.
>
>POST
> Creates a new object linked to the specified object. The
> message-id field of the new object may be set by the client or
> else will be given by the server. A URL will be allocated by the
> server and returned to the client. The new document is the data
> part of the request. It is considered to be subordinate to the
> specified object, in the way that a file is subordinate to a
> directory containing it, or a news article is subordinate to a
> newsgroup to which it is posted.

I had those reversed, since POST was used for forms. I also recall a
conversation with some folks about implementing collaborative engineering
over WWW using PUT. There's no info in the document about REPLY. You're
right, it does appear POST is the right direction:

(from http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/Methods/Post.html:)

>The POST method is desiged to allow a uniform function to cover
> Annotation existing documents;
> Posting a message to a bulletin board topic, newsgroup, mailing
> list, or similar group of articles;
> Adding a file to a directory;
> Extending a document during authorship.

(Jeez, the things you learn cruising around CERN :)

By the way, The LINK method looks VERY intriguing. I'll post about
that in a separate message...

Brian