On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 2:09 PM Friedrich W. H. Kossebau <kosse...@kde.org> wrote: > > Personally I am still unsure what the actual issue is. Why are redirects > needed at all. Why all the address changes all the time? >
It is part of the HTTP spec for servers to be able to inform clients that resource /foo/bar has moved to /bar/baz, either temporarily or permanently. This can be used to do things like mapping /retrieve/document/by/alias -> /documents/actual/document-id, or to redirect to different hosts entirely, or to inform plain text HTTP clients to upgrade to using HTTPS instead. (HSTS is a spec describing how a server can then ask the client to subsequently enforce its policy preference for when to connect over HTTPS.) The main difference between temporary and permanent redirects is that clients are allowed to "remember" when a resource moved in the case of permanent redirects so they can optimise subsequent calls to the moved resources (bypassing the redirect entirely). But as you can see, the temporary redirect is something that could be used to do load balancing: assume /resource is expensive to compute or retrieve, then put a proxy in front which load balances to the actual pool of servers using temporary redirects. (Of course you could argue that in such a case maybe round-robin DNS is a better solution altogether.) Regards, - Johan