RE: Question about section 9.3 of APP

[Joe Cheng <Joe.Cheng@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alright, I have to admit I'm not really following the arguments going back and forth over PUT, safe, etc. But re-reading Yaron's original e-mail did trigger a question in my mind that someone'll have to address at some point anyway.

Trackback requests. How are they going to work in Atom? In MovableType API, when a client publishes or edits a post, if it includes a value for the trackback field it's requesting that the server actually send a trackback. If you send the exact same post twice (in the absence of etags) you will cause a duplicate trackback to be sent. Sending duplicate trackbacks is a major faux pas--you're littering the comments area of someone else's blog. To make matters worse, if I recall correctly (the docs seem to have been taken down), the same field is used to return the URLs of trackbacks that have been sent in the past.

Now I think I might understand what Yaron's question is--should Atom say that PUT should be "safe" so trackback requests just can't be part of the entry? Or should Atom say nothing and clients/users need to have a priori knowledge of this trackback problem?

It sounds to me like folks from the WG are arguing for the latter, but for this concrete example, doesn't the former seem more in the spirit of Atom? Or are you saying that for this and most other concrete examples, you would want to do the former, but doing the latter is not *prohibited* by the atompub spec.

(Confused...)