Subject: RE: Issue: Requiring server to use / terminated URL for returned collections

From: "Clemm, Geoff" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 11:49:49 -0400

Good question, Julian.

I was going to respond "so that client side relative URL
processing is correct".  But of course, a better
way to handle that would be for the GET to just return the
slash-terminated name (or even better, the resource that it
is really redirecting the request to, such as "index.html")
in the Content-Location field, since the client is required
to use the value in the Content-Location field as the base
for relative URL processing.

So a 302 redirect is not even required for GET processing
(i.e. the server can just automatically forward the request
without an extra roundtrip for the 302 redirect).

Cheers,
Geoff

-----Original Message-----
From: Julian Reschke [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2002 10:24 AM
To: Clemm, Geoff; 'Webdav WG'
Subject: RE: Issue: Requiring server to use / terminated URL for
returned collections

Like Geoff said,

except:

> As indicated above, the 302 redirect is only required for a GET, and
> WebDAV clients commonly use PROPFIND and not GET to retrieve the state
> of a collection.

Where does this distinction come from?

I really don't want to get into a situation where 1) HEAD and 2)
PROPFIND/depth 0 say different things about the same resource.

Julian

--
<green/>bytes GmbH -- http://www.greenbytes.de -- tel:+492512807760

---

From: "Lisa Dusseault" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 10:27:45 -0700

I dug out another testimonial to the interoperability problems of not
consistently using trailing slashes. 

Geoff Alexander said:
"We are developing a WebDAV server and have encountered interoperability
problem with request on collections in which the resource does not have
a
trailing slash.  Where do things stand on this issue?  Our testing
indicates
that the above does not work in the real world.  For example, both IE 5
and
Netscape 4.7 do not properly process relative references in response to
a
GET request on a collection without the trailing slash..  I guess one
could
say that IE and Netscape only support the HTTP protocol and not WebDAV
protocol, but then our server would have to determine whether the
request
was HTTP or WebDAV (which is not a workable solution).  Also, we have
encountered interoperability problem with other WebDAV clients."

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/2002AprJun/0247.html

lisa

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From: Stefan Eissing <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 15:33:23 +0200

> for relative URL processing.

I agree with you that RFC 2616 clearly states this purpose of
Content-Location.

However, neither IE 5.0, nor IE 6.0, nor Mozilla 1.1 gives
my beautiful Content-Location header any justice: it is
completely ignored when resolving relative uri references
inside the HTML page.

So, for all practical purposes, a 302 is required.

//Stefan