On 2011-12-13 18:48, Cameron Heavon-Jones wrote:
...
The media type of the response is orthogonal to what *kind* of response you
want.
For a successful DELETE, all of the following a plausible:
- no response at all (204)
- a short status message ("deleted x and all depending resources")
- a representation of the collection the resource was removed from
- ...
None of these have anything to do with the *media type*.
Yes they are all plausible responses, but do need they *ALL* need to be returned for each
resource and same "Accept"?
Personally i would map this as follows:
No Accept Header => 204
"If no Accept header field is present, then it is assumed that the
client accepts all media types." (RFC 2616, Section 14.1)
Accept: text\plain => short status message
What if the XHR client wants to embed the status message as HTML
fragment into the current page?
Accept: text\html => representation of the collection
Again, you are overloading "Accept" with something it's not suitable for.
I understand this may not be possible for existing implementations of servers
and clients. My stance is that if you are to perform client based
content-negotiation you might as well just vary on User-Agent header, it
amounts to the same thing and is a bad practice, IMO :)
No, varying on UA is MUCH worse. In particular, it doesn't work as the
UA is the same for XHR and form access.
i understand the need for some applications to have greater fidelity over the
content of their representations however i believe this is better addressed
through URIs.
OK, let's agree to disagree on this.
No, sorry. With all due respect, I am in complete disagreement with you here.
Perhaps others can try different tacks to convince either one of us but this is
where we left it last time and looks to be just one of our unresolvable
understandings.
Indeed.
...
What needs to be negotiated is *what* is represented (a status message as
opposed to current state as opposed to...), not the format.
I disagree with negotiating *what* is represented within a single format and
that this is of relevance to form specification.
If the Preference token is not enough can you please state what additional
problem must be addressed?
Oh, a Prefer token would be enough, we just need to specify it, and make sure
that forms either send it automatically, or the author of the form can specify
it.
Best regards, Julian
I have no problem with this at all, and (just quietly) you could even get it
past me to get it automatically applied because i just don't care that much
about something that can be ignored :)
Can we say this has been put to rest (pun intended)?
Well, once we have a proposal that addresses these concerns.
Best regards, Julian
