Subject: Why HTTP/1.1 in MKCOL requests?

From: Alan Kent <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:00:35 +1000

No deep questions - just an observation that came up.

A presentation was given internally here about WebDAV to raise the
awareness of the protocol. Someone asked a question which I did not
have a good answer for.

Since the extended WebDAV commands are not a part of HTTP 1.1, why
do you say

    MKCOL /foo/bar HTTP/1.1

Why is it not

    MKCOL /foo/bar WebDAV/1.0

A few people were complaining that WebDAV seemed to be "messing up"
the HTTP 1.1 protocol, pretending to be a part of HTTP 1.1, when the
extensions are not a part of the HTTP protocol.

My answer was "thats what the spec says to do".

Alan

---

From: "Roy T. Fielding" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 23:23:50 -0700

> extensions are not a part of the HTTP protocol.

RFC 2518 uses the HTTP/1.1 standard as specified by RFC 2616, which
specifically encourages the development of additional methods for this
type of functionality.  Adding new methods does not change HTTP, for
the same reason that adding new executables doesn't change Linux.

Cheers,

Roy T. Fielding, Chief Scientist, eBuilt, Inc.
                 2652 McGaw Avenue
                 Irvine, CA 92614-5840  fax:+1.949.609.0001
                 ([email-masked])  <http://www.eBuilt.com>

                 Chairman, The Apache Software Foundation
                 ([email-masked])  <http://www.apache.org/>