On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 11:36 AM, Oldak Quill
<oldakquill(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Might not 302 be better in that it indicates the
redirect will always
be there, though the target might move in the future? Where 301
suggests that the client "ought to automatically re-link references",
302 suggests "client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future
request".
Although 302 indicates temporary move and 301 indicates permanent
move, since the Main_page could be renamed, 302 might be more fitting
anyway...
The Main Page *could* be renamed. Wikipedia *could* also move to
www.thebestencyclopediaever.net. 301 isn't an iron-clad guarantee,
it's a hint. 302 should be used for things that will definitely or at
least plausibly change in the future, not things that hypothetically
maybe could change if people really felt like it for some reason,
because the latter describes everything on the Internet.
The actual semantic difference between 301 and 302, as Oldak notes, is
that clients that can choose which URL to use in the future should
prefer the redirect target for 301, whereas they should keep using the
original URL for 302.
(There's also some differences with cacheability by default, but
explicit expiry and cache control headers override those.)
Since <http://en.wikipedia.org/> is arguably a better URL for linking to
the English Wikipedia main page than
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>, I'd see no reason not to make
the redirect a 302. We'd just be telling visitors that "our main page
is over there, but feel free to keep using this shorter URL".
--
Ilmari Karonen