Re: Review of new HTTPbis text for 303 See Other

On Jul 15, 2009, at 10:11 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> With my HTTPbis WG chair hat on:
>
> While some aspects of this thread have been related to HTTPbis'  
> work, it appears that we've resolved that portion, and many of the  
> other messages are not on-topic.

Agreed about the latter, but I do not accept that we have resolved the  
HTTPbis-relevant portion. The heated part of this thread began when I  
objected to Roy's proposed wording change on the grounds that the mere  
existence of a 200-level transmittable representation should not  
require that a 200-level response be returned. It seems to me, from  
the wording in the draft, that there could be circumstances in which a  
server has an associated resource, has a transmittable representation  
of it, and still is required (by http-range-14) to return a 303  
response **because the URI does not denote that resource**. Now, I  
quite understand if the HTTPbis WG prefers to not use language like  
"denotes" in the spec. In which case, all that needs to be done is to  
simply not **require** that the presence of a transmittable  
representation requires sending a 200 coded response (equivalently,  
not specify that a 303 response means that no transmittable  
representation **exists**.) This is enough slack to allow a server to  
handle the case in question without violating http-range-14.

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. If this is the  
case, then my objection to the wording, above, no longer applies. But  
then I would ask that the spec make this point extremely clear  
somewhere in the text, preferably by stating it explicitly. I realize  
of course that this would require using the word 'denotes', though I  
note that this word has crept into the recent URI specification also.

Thanks

Pat Hayes

Received on Thursday, 16 July 2009 11:43:17 UTC