Re: a test result

Roy Fielding (fielding@beach.w3.org)
Wed, 09 Aug 1995 17:06:02 -0400


>It sounds like several of the respondants in this thread did not read the
>parent thread, in which it was explained that under the new HTTP/1.0 draft,
>a Location header should be sent with any 2xx response to identify "the URL
>needed to retrieve that same resource again..." In other words, the new
>spec requires a 200 OK status to include a Location header. If the server
>unilaterally changes the status line to 302 whenever a location header
>appears, then it is not conforming to the spec -- for which it should be
>forgiven since the spec has changed. However, servers should never ignore
>directives, and that hasn't changed.

WHOA!!! Hold on there. It doesn't say that. It says:

If the entity corresponds to a resource, the response may include a
Location header field giving the actual location of that specific
resource for later reference.

*may* is the operative word here!

Your CGI discussion is correct, but Location is optional.

....Roy T. Fielding Department of ICS, University of California, Irvine USA
Visiting Scholar, MIT/LCS + World-Wide Web Consortium
(fielding@w3.org) (fielding@ics.uci.edu)