Re: Handling unknown elements in an entry

[James Aylett <james@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 08:14:12AM -0800, Dare Obasanjo wrote:

> From my perspective the APP would be a way to create
> content on our servers. We at no time guarantee that
> we will store what was sent with full fidelity. For
> example, we support a subset of HTML (e.g. no script
> blocks) but we don't error when users post blog
> entries with 'banned' HTML elements instead we just
> strip them.

This is explicitly allowed by APP already. (3.3, third paragraph.)
What's needed is a similar statement about metadata.

Is it possible to construct a way of the server hinting to the client
that it has thrown away information? Obviously the client could simply
fetch the entry from the server to figure out what form it ended up
in, but it would be a waste to do this every time, and perhaps a way
of notifying the user that they may care would be helpful. (Perhaps
hinting can be done by the entity as part of the 201 response on
creation; the 200 response on update.)

In many cases, I suspect clients won't worry about it too much, either
because they can keep their copy as an "editable" version, or because
they won't keep a copy at all. (Although it might be useful in some
cases to know which extensions a server supports by some introspection
mechanism, that's almost certainly too much work to do at this stage.)

James

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  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james@xxxxxxxxxxxx                               uncertaintydivision.org