[uf-rest] Roy Fielding on WebDAV and PROPs

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

I've always felt there was something wrong with WebDAV, and Roy did a  
nice summary of what over on rest-discuss:

On Apr 11, 2006, at 12:40 PM, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> PROP* methods conflict with REST because they prevent
> important resources from having URIs and effectively double the
> number of methods for no good reason.  Both Henrik and I argued
> against those methods at the time.  It really doesn't matter
> how uniform they are because they break other aspects of the
> overall model, leading to further complications in versioning
> (WebDAV versioning is hopelessly complicated), access control
> (WebDAV ACLs are completely wrong for HTTP), and just about every
> other extension to WebDAV that has been proposed.

The interesting question for me is what the "right" way to do  
properties would be over HTTP.  I presume it would require some sort  
of convention for a property namespace, which implies non-opaque  
URLs.  Which in term (in order to be RESTful) would require the  
*server* to have some way to tell clients about it, since clients  
shouldn't *assume* URI structure.

Any thoughts about the optimal way to do that?

-- Ernie P.