HTTP redirects vs Refresh: 0

[Bradley Baetz]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2003 at 01:59:55PM -0400, David Miller wrote:
> Posted to a Zippy bug after their QA reported that the refresh pages
> weren't refreshing in IE 6:
> 
> Doing some quick research, I discovered that the Refresh header (both as an
> HTTP
> header and when used in a META html tag) is Netscape-specific, and not defined
> by any standard, which means to be standards-compliant, we really should be
> setting the cookie and issuing a 302 redirect instead of having an intermediate
> page.  The question is whether or not we can alter the QUERY_STRING portion of
> the URL during the redirect...  I can't find any clear declaration of whether
> that's legal or not in RFC2616...  we may have to just try it and see if it
> works.

Yes, you can change the query string when the next response is a GET (ie
301/302/303 response)
The issue is that the resulting query string may be too long for a GET,
but we can't really redirect if we want a POST. That issue affectes
refresh too, though, so its not a new issue.

Theres one place with refresh: 10 (the error you get if you don't have
any params for buglist.cgi). What should we do with that? We can drop
the refresh entirely, or leave it in for NS browsers.

Bradley