Subject: issue 79: must understand content-* header fields or fail

From: "Roy T. Fielding" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:24:00 +0200

The editors spent some time discussing

   http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/79

with regard to the requirement in RFC 2616, section.9.6,
the description of PUT:

"The recipient of the entity MUST NOT ignore any Content-*
(e.g. Content-Range) headers that it does not understand or
implement and MUST return a 501 (Not Implemented) response
in such cases."

The purpose of this requirement was to enable some future
use of Content-Range for the purpose of partial updates.

No server that I am aware of supports that requirement.
Partial updates should be accomplished using a new method
(PATCH) rather than a retroactive requirement on deployed
services that nobody implemented.

My proposal is to remove that sentence from the spec and
note in the changes section that the requirement was removed
in favor of deploying PATCH.

....Roy

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From: Sam Johnston <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:29:46 +0200

> in favor of deploying PATCH.

I would tend to agree with this sentiment and have already identified a
number of areas where PATCH would be useful (and where patchy support for
Content-* would cause more problems than anything else).

Sam