- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@liege.ICS.UCI.EDU>
- Date: Thu, 08 Aug 1996 13:20:57 -0700
- To: Koen Holtman <koen@win.tue.nl>
- cc: Richard Johnson <raj@cisco.com>, masinter@parc.xerox.com, www-talk@w3.org
> Richard Johnson:
>>
>>I believe that any application which uses a "302 Moved Temporarily" code in
>>order to redirect the end user to a new URI with the intent they should
>>bookmark the new URI is broken.
>
> That would make all clickable maps out there broken.
>
> I prefer to think of the spec as being the broken party here, because
> it is possible to fix the spec in a future version, while it is
> impossible to fix all existing clickable maps.
No, the spec is not broken. The reason it says SHOULD instead of MUST
is because there are some circumstances wherein the user agent KNOWS
which of the two references is better to bookmark, and it is under
those conditions (and ONLY those conditions) that an application is
allowed to treat the 302 as if it were a 301. However, those conditions
are application-dependent (such as selecting a coordinate of an imagemap
in HTML, or receiving a redirect that differs only in the appendage of
a trailing slash) and not something that can be easily formulated as
part of the protocol. These are browser issues -- bookmarks have no
meaning in HTTP (and even if they did, they would be indicated via Link).
...Roy T. Fielding
Department of Information & Computer Science (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-3425 fax:+1(714)824-4056
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/
Received on Thursday, 8 August 1996 16:33:43 UTC