Re: 301/302

>>>>> "JF" == John Franks <john@math.nwu.edu> writes:

JF> I think Roy's point was that this will not work in the presence of
JF> proxies.  He points out that proxies are not allowed to change status
JF> codes.  Because of the hop-by-hop nature of versioning, the server has
JF> no idea what version the client is using -- it only knows the version of
JF> the nearest proxy.  It can send a 303 based on this proxy being 1.1,
JF> but proxies are not allowed to change status codes, so the 303 may go
JF> all the way back to the (perhaps 1.0) client which may not understand
JF> it.

JF> Perhaps I am missing something, but I see no way to safely send a 303
JF> (or any other status which 1.0 clients don't understand, if there are
JF> any) in the presence of proxies.

  I don't see an explicit statement anywhere in draft...-v11-08 that
  says proxies are not allowed to change status codes (I only looked
  for about 10 minutes).  I believe such a rule would be a real
  impediment to future extentions, as illustrated above.

  Indeed, it seems to me that proxies dealing with a higher version
  origin server and a lower version client may often have to translate
  status codes.

  In this particular case, the rule:

     However, applications MUST understand the class of any
     status code, as indicated by the first digit, and treat any
     unrecognized response as being equivalent to the x00 status
     code of that class

  is interesting, since it says that a '303' should be interpreted as
  '300', which is:

    10.3.1 300 Multiple Choices

    ...SHOULD include the specific URL for that representation in
    the Location field; user agents MAY use the Location field
    value for automatic redirection.

--
Scott Lawrence           EmWeb Embedded Server       <lawrence@agranat.com>
Agranat Systems, Inc.        Engineering            http://www.agranat.com/

Received on Thursday, 4 September 1997 08:07:11 UTC