Re: GET/HEAD support "MUST"

Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
> Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Both RFC2616 and bis both include the following:
>>> The methods GET and HEAD MUST be supported by all general-purpose
>>> servers.
>>
>> This is unclear for several reasons:
>>
>> a) Although the server MUST support those two methods, MUST it support
>> it for every resource?
> 
> Dunno.

It must support them in tandem.  Implementing HEAD that corresponds to
anything except GET is not valid.  Implementing GET without HEAD is not
valid either.

Nothing says a resource must support them, however.  E.g. PUT to a specific
URI might be valid, but there is no resource yet before PUT, ergo GET and
HEAD would be 404 not found.

It's probably a good idea to implement them, in a write-only server they
could consistently return 404.

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2009 21:08:52 UTC