On May 7, 2007, at 11:33 AM, Eric Busboom wrote:
> Are the problems with WebDAV's versioning and ACL related to the
> additional methods? How?

The core problem is complexity. They treat every new object as
a new data type with a new set of methods to manipulate it.
The REST way of doing it would be to map the data into resources
and provide links between them, thereby allowing all of the existing
methods to apply where needed for retrieval, updates, etc.
Versioning exposes a sequence of related resources and a map of
that sequence. ACLs are just a related resource that happens to
influence access control on the server.

What is central to Web Architecture (so central, in fact, that I
forgot to even mention it as the primary design goal for REST) is
that the Web is the set of resources interlinked by URIs. The
problem isn't just that there are a large number of new methods
in those specs, but that the new methods supplant what should
have been resources that respond to GET. The result is that a
user of these technologies must learn an entirely new vocabulary
and a new set of tools for something that could easily have
been accomplished via hypertext.

....Roy