Ian Bicking on Atompub vs. WebDAV

January 11th, 2009

Ian Bicking:

So, open issues:
* How to strongly suggest a path when creating a resource (better than Slug)
* How to rename (move) or copy a page (it’s easy enough to punt on copy, but I’d rather move by a little more formal than just recreating a resource in a new location and deleting the original)
* How to represent abbreviated Atom entries

Strongly suggest a path by using PUT as defined in HTTP. If there is a problem, the server will return an error code or tell you to try something else (you would have to figure out how much communication would be good).

HTTP sucks at move and copy, so all HTTP-based solutions will suck equally.

Make abbreviated Atom entries by abbreviating them, and then deciding on some way to link them together.

I still think the future will look like some unholy combination of JSON, Protocol Buffers, Waka, and OPML. Hopefully, it will emerge in an ad-hoc fashion and get written down a little later on, separate from the HTML specification.

Posted by rsayre Filed in Uncategorized
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One Response to “Ian Bicking on Atompub vs. WebDAV”

  1. Ian Bicking Says:
    January 11th, 2009 at 8:52 pm

    Hmm… yeah, I guess PUT would work fine. It’d be less closely related to Atompub then, but that’s kind of incidental. Also, everywhere else where you PUT an entry it isn’t directly related to the rendered page (it’s specified explicitly in the atom entry using a link). If you PUT to its final destination it’s hard to apply to an existing application. Except for that PUT you could take an existing CMS and tweak a few things in the template, and install a parallel component that handles this API, in a completely separate URL space.