- From: Roy Fielding <fielding@beach.w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 25 Aug 1995 22:04:55 -0400
- To: Paul Leach <paulle@microsoft.com>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Paul Leech reports:
>Section 5.2.2 on the HEAD method says that HEAD is just like GET,
>except that the server must not return any Entity-Body in the response.
>Section 6.2.3 on redirection status codes, 301 and 302 (Moved
>Permanently and Moved Temporarily ) says that the Entity-Body in the
>response should contain a short hypertext note. Similarly for 303 (See Other).
Ooops, contradiction.
>Presumably, 301 and 302 are reasonable responses for HEAD requests (303
>is not so obvious -- it might be only OK as a response to a POST in
>1.1?) and so require Entity-Bodies, which HEAD says can't be sent. In
>the description for 300, it explictly says that 300 in response to a
>HEAD request doesn't return an Entity-Body; there is no explicit
>exemption for 301, 302, or 303.
>
>In section 5.2.2, was the intent to say that HEAD is like GET, except
>that whenever GET would return 200 and an Entity-Body, HEAD will return
>204 and no Entity-Body? That seems plausible, and reconciles all
>behavioral difference except for when GET would return 300. Equally
>plausible is that 301, 302, and 303 should contain the same exception
>for HEAD that 300 contains. I don't know the intent, so I can't make a
>recommendation.
>
>Which should it be?
The latter -- I'll fix this in both specs.
....Roy T. Fielding Department of ICS, University of California, Irvine USA
Visiting Scholar, MIT/LCS + World-Wide Web Consortium
(fielding@w3.org) (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
Received on Friday, 25 August 1995 19:07:19 UTC