31 ms·

Maybe it's bad design, then?

• Piskvorrr 11y ago
  At least on three counts - in user agents, in crawlers and in RFC: - I definitely see bad design in interpreting the RFC as "if no caching metadata, then cache forever;" this violates Principle of Least Astonishment. - Also, "301 and 302 has completely different meaning to a crawler" seems illogical. - Perhaps the RFC should have also specified something like "in absence of caching headers, don't assume 'cache forever', that is a long time"; it does not try too much to prevent implementors from shooting themselves (and users) in the feet.
  • donatj 11y ago
    Permanent meaning anything other than permanent violates the Principle of least astonishment.
    • Piskvorrr 11y ago
      See my original post - permanent Permanent Redirect works as designed ;) I was later trying to point out possible ambiguities in how the spec is interpreted vs. how it's written. In defense of the browsers - the RFC does say, in essence, "rewrite the 301'd URL and be done with it," so the browser does not even need to deal with the redirect any more.
    • kedean 11y ago
      I would argue that your statement is only true as long as the URL in question is owned by the application that sent the 301 in the first place. If a different application now owns the URL, then it violates least astonishment for the URL to be redirect when, from it's perspective, the redirect was never sent. At the least, a redirect should not be permanent across name server changes (when the domain changes hands). Unfortunately, this would effectively be adding state to HTTP.