Re: UA norm for redirects (both META and http)

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Robert J Burns wrote:
>
> Thanks for the input on this. I changed the wiki page[1] so that it only
> concerns 301 (permanently moved) redirects[2]. The motivation behind the
> proposal is to advise UAs to treat the 301s and the META redirect
> consistently and in an interoperable manner that authors (and users) can
> count on.

Why would you want <meta> redirects be treated as "permanently moved"?
How about pages such as:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<meta http-equiv=refresh
content=5;http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://example.net>
<h1>Down for maintenance</h1>
<p>We're down for maintenance. In the mean time, you can browse the
site using the <a
href=http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://example.net>Internet Archive
Wayback Machine</a>. You should be automatically redirected to the
archive in about 5 seconds.

Or are you proposing such a treatment only for "immediate" redirects?

> On the issue of authoring misuse of 301s, is there some other litmus test we
> can apply (such as consistent response headers) that could help identify
> these misused 301s?

Actually the problem is more with misused 302s. CGI "containers" (such
as Apache) for instance issue a 302 if the program outputs a Location
response header and no other Status has been set. PHP has mimic'd this
behavior for consistency between the CGI and "module" versions.


However, my opinion is that <meta> redirects should be considered 302s/307s.

-- 
Thomas Broyer

Received on Sunday, 1 June 2008 12:54:41 UTC