>I agree here. There is already a redirection mechanism in place, but
>I don't think the results of the redirection are cached across
>sessions. I would love it if the user could ask for page a on machine
>b, and be told that page a now lives on machine c, and remember that
>fact until told otherwise. after all, a redirection like this only
>takes 30 or 40 bytes, and the typical client could store thousands of
>them very neatly.
You need to be careful there. Redirection is often used to do some
processing at point A and the continue on to point B. You don't want to
cache *that* result. It's not always as the result of a form submission
either. In fact we do this when people point a Lycos, Yahoo, Infoseek or
OpenText search at one of our mailing lists. We check the Referer field,
figure out what you were searching for in the particular file you are
hitting, and then redirect you to the same document, but this time with
parameters (including a #xxx) which will take you to the right point in the
document. Caching that would make it impossible for the user to ever go
directly to the top of the document.
Now if you want to argue that Redirect is for moved documents, and there
should be a "NowGoHere" directive, I might be persuaded. But...
Kee Hinckley Utopia Inc. - Cyberspace Architects=81 617/721-6100
[email protected] http://www.utopia.com/
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.