Re: NEW ISSUE: cacheability of status 303

On Oct 16, 2007, at 6:23 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
> Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) wrote:
>>> From: Julian Reschke [mailto:julian.reschke@gmx.de]
>>>
>>> Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) wrote:
>>>> Re:
>>>>
>>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2007JulSep/ 
>>> 0048.html
>>>> Yes, big improvement.  May I suggest two editorial changes:
>>>>
>>>> 1. s/The Location URI indicates/The Location URI SHOULD indicate/
>>> I'm not sure how this is better. Do you want to indicate that
>>> there may
>>> be edge cases where the Location URI does indicate something else?
>> Not by intent, but yes.  My thinking was that the owner of the URI  
>> originally requested may not be the same as the owner of the  
>> redirect URI, and hence the first owner might not have control  
>> over whether the resource at the redirect URI really *is*  
>> "descriptive of the requested resource", even though it is thought  
>> to be.
>> BTW, I do notice one other thing.  I suggest changing the  
>> following sentence:
>>     A 303 response to a GET request indicates that the requested
>>     resource does not have a representation of its own that can be
>>     transferred by the server over HTTP.
>> to:
>>     A 303 response to a GET request indicates that the requested
>>     resource does not have a representation of its own, available
>>     from the request URI, that can be transferred by the server
>>     over HTTP.
>> The reason is that if the same resource were requested via a  
>> different URI, it might indeed provide a representation of its own  
>> (if it were an information resource).

In which case it would be redirected via a 301, 302, or 307.
303 only redirects to different resources, which means the requested
resource for the 303 response is different from the target resource,
even if that difference can't be measured in bits.  Even if they
aren't, in fact, different, the client is being told by the server
that they should be interpreted as different, and that makes it fact
as far as HTTP's interface is concerned.

There is no information resource in HTTP, for the same reason that
there is no spoon in the Matrix.

....Roy

Received on Tuesday, 16 October 2007 19:48:30 UTC