Martijn Pieters wrote:
But what if there are side effects to calling the document? What should happen? I don't want a counter to go up or anything just because a HEAD was called on the object.
This is not as black-and-white and simple an issue.
The web is an imperfect medium, but returning a junk content type isn't good. I don't know the answer to the sideeffects thing, but I would come down on the site of 'if you expose something through the web, you should expect to have it spidered...' but that's cause I value search engine hits a lot. The trick would be to set the content type when the object is created and have it stored in the object, not computed for each request. Would a property suffice for that? Then, say, if you knew your DTML method was going to return plain text, you could set the content-type property to text/plain. Thsi could be returned in the head without having to evaluate the object to return the head, which is a bit innefficient. I'm sure that's possible and better than it is now, but at the absolute least the junk should cover the most likely outcome, ie text/html instead of application/octet-stream, which is possibly the worst one I can think to choose ;-) cheers, Chris