Re: atompub vs. webdav

[Tim Bray <Tim.Bray@xxxxxxx>]

On Nov 9, 2008, at 2:32 PM, Danny Ayers wrote:

> I vaguely remember early on in discussions some criticism of parts of
> WebDAV as being not-quite-RESTful.
>
> Could someone please remind me/point me to relevant discussion - what
> was wrong with WebDAV and how was it fixed in atompub?

I've never thought there was anything terribly wrong with WebDAV in  
theory.  In practice I've had all sorts of pain getting clients and  
servers to interoperate, it sure ain't a "Just Works" kind of thing.

AtomPub is different from DAV in two key respects:
- The client doesn't control where things go, the server does
- It is allowed and expected that an AtomPub server will look at the  
incoming information and change it (generate ID, timestamps, sanitize  
HTML, etc)

Both of these things probably make  AtomPub a better match for the  
needs of dumb clients and typical Web publishing server  
implementations than DAV.  That's the theory, anyhow.  -Tim