RE: 301/302
Yaron Goland (yarong@MICROSOFT.com)
Wed, 3 Sep 1997 20:04:38 -0700
Agreed but it is the lesser evil. It doesn't break anyone. That is the
price we pay for backwards compatibility. My advice to a script writer
is use 302 if you want to always redirect to GET and use 307 if you want
to redirect to the same method.
Yaron
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Josh Cohen [SMTP:josh@netscape.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 1997 3:36 PM
> To: Larry Masinter
> Cc: Klaus Weide; Yaron Goland;
> http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
> Subject: Re: 301/302
>
> Ok, lets assume for the moment that we adopt the 307 proposal.
> (hypothetically)..
>
> Now, Im joe CGI script writer, and Im writing a new CGI script.
> I want to make the client do the "redirect with GET behavior".
> So, I read the spec and figure out what to do.
> Hmm.. 302 is deprecated, so I shouldnt use that.
> Ahah! 303, thats what I want..
> So, I code my script to respond with a 303, confident that the
> client will come back with a GET for the location: I specify.
>
> NOPE.
> 90% of the browsers today dont support 303 (yet).
> If this isnt backwards incompatible, what is?
>
> So, I could either:
> 1) send 302, ( yeah it says 'deprecated', but it will live forever,
> it will never be 'safe' to send 303 )
>
> 2) only send 303 if the request was HTTP/1.1
> This gets ugly..
>
> It seems to me that the "swap" proposal only leaves an ambiguous
> case, with the potential to fail for implementations who
> follow the 'interim spec' (prior to the swap), but remains
> mostly functional with 90% of the existing browsers.
>
> The "307" proposal, will allow currently functioning CGI
> scripts to continue to work, but it will be a very long
> time until a CGI implementor can feel comfortable with
> returning a 303.
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -------
> Josh Cohen <josh@netscape.com> Netscape
> Communications Corp.
> http://people.netscape.com/josh/
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