"Brian Cassidy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > -----Original Message----- > > What do you think it should do exactly? > > I would say... redirect! > > At least, since the RFC (2616, see section 6.1.1, last paragraph) says that > all unknown status codes are to be handled by the base code (ie 320 => 300), > then those unknown 3XX codes should redirect. Code 300 can be auto-handled > by grabbing the Location header field.
I buy the argument that RFC 2616 actually states that an unknown code like 320 should be handled like 300. But if you read the spec for how to deal with the various 3xx codes it seems obvious that you would do the wrong thing if you did not know how to deal with 304 or 305 and just treated them as 300. I therefore consider it safer to just do nothing for unknown 3xx codes. If the list of 3xx codes is expanded in the future there will probably be very specic behaviours requested by a client. And how to handle 300 responses is not really well defined in RFC 2616 either. It says that the "entity" will contain a list of resources that the user agent can choose between. It then goes on to say that there might also be a Location field containing the server's preferred choice. It does not specify what entity types can be used, and it does not say what should happen to non-GET requests if we were to follow this Location. Should we handle it like 303 or 307? In short I think it is better to just ignore this problem and do nothing at the LWP level about it. Do you know how MSIE/Mozilla deal with 300 responses? Regards, Gisle
