On Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 11:57:51PM +0200, J.Pietschmann wrote:

If you dig deeper you'll uncover a lot more problems with document(),
both for users and implementors. For example, accessing the URL might
have side effects in the server, and some people want to access the URL

  The people who still don't understand that GET should not have
side effects deserve to have failing code, failing business and
get back to reading specs.

Nice try. Note that I didn't say that the protocol is HTTP.
Something like document('imap://mailserver/j.r.hacker/latest-reports')
may give a more interesting szenario.
Note further that I used this as just one more example of
behaviour which the spec left to the implementation. There
are others beside this and error conditions.