- From: Terje Bless <link@pobox.com>
- Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 18:04:50 +0200
- To: W3C Validator <www-validator@w3.org>
- cc: lholst@robotics.lu.se
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Lars Holst <lholst@robotics.lu.se> wrote: >Btw, I have no idea what "HTTP redirection" is. An explanation or a link >would be helpful. Ah, I suspect everyone just asumed you allready knew what it was (as opposed to how to actually implement it) since a "HTTP Redirect" is the actual function that your "refresh" is trying to accomplish. What you have today is a web page that contains a special instruction. The User Agent (be it a browser or the Validator) is expected to download the page, look at its contents, find the "refresh" instruction, wait the specified amount of time (which just happens to be "0" seconds, but really could be anything), and then proceede to the new address. A "HTTP Redirect" on the other hand acts much more directly. When the User Agent (i.e. a browser or the validator) first contacts your server and requests the page in question, the _server_ itself will immediately tell it that it should instead look at the new address. The "301" and "302" which have been mentioned here are status codes (as, e.g., "200 OK" and "404 Not Found") that lets the User Agent know _why_ it should look elsewhere. It might be a temporary condition, the page might have moved permanently, the original "page" may have been a CGI or PHP script that generated an output file and the proper HTTP status code can tell the User Agent this and that the resulting file can be found at a new address. There are many good reasons why it is a good idea to do this using a HTTP Redirect, but I'm afraid that discussion would be somewhat out of scope for this forum. There are however several excellent forums where it could be brought up (check the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.* hierarchy on USENET for one example). Kynn is very much right that you need to read up a little on the technologies involved. A casual web author does not usaully need to know such things, as you say, but I'm afraid the effect you are after falls somewhat outside the "casual" bracket and moves into sufficiently advanced territory that some reading is required. If the page Olivier pointed you at is not sufficient then that is a shortcoming that we acknowledge, and we should seek to remedy that by improving the resource (if you have suggestions then please do let us know!). How much can be done to improve it -- and the other Tips in that cataegory -- depends entirely on our available resources, and these Tips have historically suffered from lack of time and volunteers to improve or maintain them. Now that one specific deficiency with this Tip has been pointed out I hope we will be able to at least adress the concern raised eventually, but it may take some time. ( BTW, if /anyone/ have suggestions regarding this -- or any other aspect of the Validator for that matter! -- then we very much want to hear about it. Links we should add or new text to include would be very much welcome! ) Thanks for your feedback on this Lars! - -- Of course we are the good guys! We define what is good and evil. All other definitions are wrong, and possibly the product of a deranged imagination. -- Stephen Harris -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP SDK 3.0.2 iQA/AwUBPyVJoaPyPrIkdfXsEQIYswCgpIGb8666JWm6X6xXFe1n8L5QJy8Anj5B 6FynJGjJgrEa6uOgcuPBxpFV =JKrf -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Received on Monday, 28 July 2003 12:05:07 UTC