HTTP Status 308 (Permanent Redirect)

Hi there,

this status code was defined in draft-reschke-http-status-308-07 and 
approved as Experimental RFC almost two years ago:

   <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-reschke-http-status-308/>

It's been sitting in the RFC Editor queue since then, waiting for the 
HTTPbis specs to arrive.

When it was written, the status code description was consistent with the 
HTTPbis P2 draft that was current back then -- see 
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics-19.html#rfc.section.7.3>.

Since then, the definition was rephrased quite a bit, and I believe it 
would be good to update the prose in the 308 definition accordingly in 
order to avoid confusion.

The proposed diffs are here: 
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-http-status-308-latest-from-previous.diff.html> 
(which also contains some more changes due to HTTPbis P2 section number 
changes).

The full text of the section would change from:

> 3.  308 Permanent Redirect
>
>    The target resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any
>    future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned
>    URIs.  Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically
>    re-link references to the effective request URI (Section 5.5 of
>    [draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging]) to one or more of the new
>    references returned by the server, where possible.
>
>    Caches MAY use a heuristic (see [draft-ietf-httpbis-p6-cache],
>    Section 2.3.1.1) to determine freshness for 308 responses.
>
>    The new permanent URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the
>    response ([draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics], Section 10.5).  A
>    response payload can contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink
>    to the new URI(s).
>
>       Note: This status code is similar to 301 Moved Permanently
>       (Section 7.3.2 of [draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics]), except that
>       it does not allow rewriting the request method from POST to GET.

to:

> 3.  308 Permanent Redirect
>
>    The 308 (Permanent Redirect) status code indicates that the target
>    resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future
>    references to this resource ought to use one of the enclosed URIs.
>    Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link
>    references to the effective request URI (Section 5.5 of
>    [draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging]) to one or more of the new
>    references sent by the server, where possible.
>
>    The server SHOULD generate a Location header field
>    ([draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics], Section 7.1.2) in the response
>    containing a preferred URI reference for the new permanent URI.  The
>    user agent MAY use the Location field value for automatic
>    redirection.  The server's response payload usually contains a short
>    hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s).
>
>    A 308 response is cacheable by default; i.e., unless otherwise
>    indicated by the method definition or explicit cache controls (see
>    [draft-ietf-httpbis-p6-cache], Section 4.2.2).
>
>       Note: This status code is similar to 301 (Moved Permanently)
>       ([draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics], Section 6.4.2), except that it
>       does not allow changing the request method from POST to GET.

Although this hasn't been a WG work item, it would be awesome if a few 
people could review the proposed change and give feedback about whether 
this would be an acceptable change prior to publication as RFC.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Thursday, 6 February 2014 12:29:12 UTC