At Wed, 3 Oct 2007 19:39:10 -0700, "Aron Roberts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > In the message "Re: HEAD not well supported?", dated 10/3/07, Adam Taft wrote: > >NO! The whole point of HEAD is to emulate a GET request, except > >without returning the message body. You don't need to send 204 > >because, by definition, HEAD already means no content. > > That makes sense: why return a status code indicating explicitly > that no content is to be returned, since that may falsely imply that > content in the entity body is sometimes allowed? > > In that case, then, a status code of 200 would seem to be the only > appropriate success response from an HTTP HEAD request. Status codes > 201 through 203 appear to be inappropriate to HEAD requests, as well.
To be pedantic: the status code is NOT part of the message headers, and not then part of the metainformation which should be the same in a HEAD as in a GET, per 2616. But I certainly can’t think of a good reason to have a different status code for a HEAD from a GET. > >A call to HEAD should return _exactly_ the same headers as the same > >call to GET. > > True. Responses to HEAD requests should return the same set of > HTTP headers as responses to GET requests, except for the empty > entity body. > > As a slight refinement, however, responses to HEAD requests should > not always return the range of status codes appropriate to GET > requests. There are certain HTTP status codes are only appropriate > to a specific HTTP method, or a subset of those methods. > Specifically, there are some status codes that are appropriate to be > returned in response to GET requests but not in response to HEAD > requests. Could you point these status codes out to me? I can’t figure out which ones you might mean. best, Erik Hetzner ;; Erik Hetzner, California Digital Library ;; gnupg key id: 1024D/01DB07E3
pgpF6BQICFgBm.pgp
Description: PGP signature
