Re: Review of new HTTPbis text for 303 See Other

tor 2009-07-16 klockan 06:42 -0500 skrev Pat Hayes:

> Alternatively, it may be (cf my recent message to Richard) that the  
> phrase "the requested resource" is **always** understood to refer to  
> the resource that the URI denotes, or is intended to denote, even when  
> this is not the resource that the URI resolves to.

It is.

HTTP does not care how servers resolve URIs and should not. Nor does
HTTP care about any meaning of URIs, just the existence of URIs and that
the indicated servers map these to resources.

My reading of what you say above is that the URI resolves into a
resource on the server even if the URI isn't meant to resolve into that
resource, which at least to me doesn't make much sense. If this happens
then either the wrong URI was used, or the server-side resource mapping
is wrong (broken). Or perhaps you use a different meaning for resource
than intended by the HTTP protocol.

HTTP does intentionally not define any URI naming scheme or resolution
model on servers, just the syntax of how valid HTTP-URIs may be built.

The wording is meant to be read "for this specific Requested-URI", as is
any other property related to HTTP responses in general. Not in a global
sense, and bears no relation to any possibly related resources the
server may have available privately or published at other URI locations.
303 means that the server knows about the meaning of the requested URI
but DO NOT have a representation suitable to be sent in response to
requests for that specific URI, which includes matching the intended
meaning of that URI by whatever name scheme the server implements even
if the servers internal URI naming scheme resolver happens to find one
or more possibly related resources but of which none which actually
matches the servers intended meaning of the requested URI..

What makes a resource suitable to be sent or not in response to requests
for a given URI is outside of HTTP specifications and nothing HTTP cares
about. That's purely a server side implementation decision.

Regards
Henrik

Received on Friday, 17 July 2009 01:27:47 UTC