Re: DELETE and 410 Gone

Le 25 août 2011 à 19:49, Thomson, Martin a écrit :
> I've always found 410 to be a bit weird.  The idea that *any* information about a particular resource can be considered permanent is antithetical to my understanding of the way the system works.

Nathan has asked a few questions about it.

    2: Can/could 410 Gone response include 
       a Last-Modified header?
    — [1] Resource states (initial and final)

and an indirect question about can a server tell a resource is non existant. [2], which mentioned a few times 410. 

But what is interesting (to me) is that 410 has been barely discussed through the years on the mailing list and specifically I haven't found documents, discussions about its birth. 

* May 1996 - draft of the specification http11 v3
* Jun 1996 - Cacheability of 410 responses [4]
* Mar 1998 - implementation/interop states [5]
* Sep 1998 - implementation status [6]
  4t 2y  7n| 4t 0y 14n| 2t 0y  6n|H 10.4.11 410 Gone
* Oct 1998 - What's new in HTTP 1.1 compared to HTTP 1.0 [7]

So I went off-list [8] :)

* Dec 1995 - Roy explained in his PostScript :) slides [9] 
  the new features of HTTP/1.1 (including 410 and DELETE)

The first definition of DELETE seems to be in Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0 March 8, 1995 [10]
======================================================================
    410 Gone

    The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no 
    forwarding address is known. This condition should be considered 
    permanent. Clients with link editing capabilities are encouraged to 
    delete references to the Request-URI (after user approval). If the 
    server does not know (or has no facility to determine) whether or 
    not the condition is permanent, the status code "404 Not Found" can 
    be used instead.

    The "410 Gone" response is primarily intended to assist the task of 
    web maintenance by notifying the recipient that the resource is 
    intentionally unavailable and that the server owners desire that 
    remote links to that resource be removed. Such an event is common 
    for limited-time, promotional services and for resources belonging 
    to individuals no longer working at the server's site. It is not 
    necessary to mark all permanently unavailable resources as "gone" 
    or to keep the mark for any length of time -- that is left to the 
    discretion of the server owner.
======================================================================
with a more practical paragraph than the current one. 
but a complete fail in my search for discussions around it.

[1]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2011JanMar/thread#msg51
[2]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2011JanMar/thread#msg53
[3]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/1996MayAug/0036
[4]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/1996MayAug/0469
[5]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/1998JanApr/0508
[6]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/1998SepDec/0065
[7]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/1998SepDec/0093
[8]: http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/
[9]: http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/meetings/slides-dallas.ps
[10]: http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/history/draft-ietf-http-v10-spec-00.txt


-- 
Karl Dubost - http://dev.opera.com/
Developer Relations & Tools, Opera Software

Received on Friday, 26 August 2011 01:44:35 UTC