RE: UA norm for redirects (both META and http)

Is it the business of the HTML specification to define the behavior of the
UA's UI in this manner? I truly hope not. Maybe there are other instances in
the spec where stuff like this occurs, but this is logically equal to, "UAs
that maintain a back/forward history must use a left-pointing and a
right-pointing arrow graphic on the buttons that provide this
functionality."

I do not believe it is the HTML 5 spec's place to dictate to UA developers
how their UAs react outside of their actions regarding the HTML itself. In
other words, our place is to tell the UA folks, "when you see this, perform
a redirect". It is not our place to tell them, "when you perform a redirect,
you must let the user know."

Aside from all of that, it is an extraordinarily problematic proposal
regardless; I think of all of the Web apps that would break because the
author never coded that page that performed the redirect to tag it with a
unique request ID in the GET/POST data, and by putting it into the browser
history, make it possible for the user to re-request the page without a full
re-submission from the original form, causing potential havoc. Not to
mention the general undesirability of clogging the browser history with a
million and one redirects. I bet that about 5% - 10% of my interactions with
my Web browser result in a redirect, thanks to form submission pages that do
a post-processing redirect so that "Refresh" does not repost the data and
therefore double bill/post/whatever. Adding all of those intermediaries to
the history seems like a train wreck to me.

J.Ja

-----Original Message-----
From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Robert J Burns
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 9:51 AM
To: public-html@w3.org
Subject: UA norm for redirects (both META and http)


Dear WG,

Here is another issue that needs to be introduced here for discussion,  
as it will be added to the issue-tracker in time. This issue has been  
discussed within the WG previously surrounding accessibility concerns  
when UAs follow redirects without updating users and the user's data.  
I welcome additional feedback.

UA norm for redirects (both META and http).[1]

Take care,
Rob

[1]: <http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/RedirectNorm>

Received on Thursday, 29 May 2008 15:58:57 UTC