Re: can't check this doc.

To troubleshoot the redirect issue, I highly recommend the "Live HTTP  
Headers" extension on Firefox.  Using this, I found that the server  
redirects to the root of the site and sets a cookie at the same time.   
Apparently once the cookie is set, the redirect will no longer take  
place.  I'd have to check to be sure, but I imagine that the client  
library in use (at least as implemented) does not store cookies  
provided by the server.  Because the client library never stores and  
provides the cookie, the redirect continues to take place.

Certainly this is a shortsighted implementation on the server: to  
require a cookie and ignore the fact that cookies may not be  
supported.  This may also keep a number of crawlers from indexing the  
site.

On Nov 25, 2007, at 6:07 PM, Ville Skyttä wrote:

>
> On Sunday 25 November 2007, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>> Daniel Talbot wrote:
>>> How come I cannot check this document
>>> http://home.comcast.net/~daniels_orchids/  I get an error  ( 301
>>> Moved Permanently )when I try to check it.
>>
>> The error message is somewhat misleading, since there is nothing  
>> wrong
>> with a 301 redirection per se. The problem is that due to server
>> misconfiguration, the 301 response redirects to the same URL,  
>> causing an
>> infinite loop, as you can see e.g. by checking the response headers
>> using the http://web-sniffer.net service.
>>
>> I suppose this is a rare error condition, so it's not particularly
>> important how it is handled. Ideally, the validator should report  
>> that
>> the resource cannot be retrieved due to self-referencing redirection,
>> but I'm not sure whether this would really help.
>
> Anyway, since a few weeks ago, the development version does print out
> libwww-perl's warning messages (if any) when retrieving a document  
> fails,
> which among other things do contain information (albeit pretty low  
> level and
> technical) about this particular case:
>
> http://qa-dev.w3.org/wmvs/HEAD/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fhome.comcast.net%2F%7Edaniels_orchids%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
>
> "
> I got the following unexpected response when trying to retrieve
> <http://home.comcast.net/~daniels_orchids/>:
>
>    301 Moved Permanently
>
> More information about why this is happening may be available from  
> warnings
> reported by the validator's HTTP (and other protocol) client library:
>
>    Redirect loop detected (max_redirect = 7)
> "
>

Received on Monday, 26 November 2007 18:30:32 UTC