httpRange-14 Adjunct: 302 is Valid for Non-Information Resources

I suggest that the TAG issue an adjunct to their finding for issue
httpRange-14, given that RFC 2616 notes that 302 may be used in place
of 303 for backwards compatibility:

      Note: Many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 303
      status. When interoperability with such clients is a concern, the
      302 status code may be used instead, since most user agents react
      to a 302 response as described here for 303.

      - http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt ยง10.3.4

And therefore resources denoted by HTTP URIs which return 302 codes
when deferenced MAY be non-information resources, such as the moon or
a car or the colour purple.

The following is consistent with web architecture, i.e. RFC 2616 and
the TAG's findings:

$ curl -Is http://inamidst.com/misc/moon
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon

<http://inamidst.com/misc/moon> a :NaturalSatellite .
:NaturalSatellite owl:disjointWith webarch:InformationResource .

Though RFC 2616 and the TAG finding already state this case's
legality, I believe it would be useful to users of the Semantic Web
etc. were the TAG to note that it is permissible to denote a
non-information resource with a 302-returning HTTP URI.

Thanks,

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/

Received on Thursday, 29 November 2007 14:50:33 UTC