Ah. That makes a lot of sense, but I don't think I've seen it expressed that way
before. Are there content-type definitions that make that explicit? (I suppose
it mostly applies to xml or html-based formats, where the same type of language
is used to express the state of the resource and the purely content-type
elements.)

-- Jim

--- In rest-discuss@yahoogroups.com, Sandeep Shetty <sandeep.shetty@...> wrote:
>
> Hey Jim,
>
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 1:12 AM, Jim Edwards-Hewitt<jimeh@...> wrote:
> > I have resources that support GET and PUT, but contain some parts that
> > clients are not allowed to modify. (This doesn't seem like an uncommon case;
> > I would think that navigation links, for example, would typically not be
> > modifiable in a PUT.)
>
> IMO, you seem to be confusing between the state of the resource and
> its representation. GET and PUT allow you to retrieve and set the
> state of the resource. The data format used for transferring that
> state is the media type. "Navigation links" are specific to the media
> type and not the state of the resource. I could PUT
> application/atom+xml or application/x-www-form-urlencoded and GET
> text/html.
>
> --
> Sandeep Shetty
> http://sandeep.shetty.in/
>