Re: [Lynx-dev] 301 redirection of post content?

[David Woolley]

> The choices are proceed, show url,  use  get and council.
> On prior occasions I I would just use proceed the p thinking it needed
> me to confirm my wanting to go there.
> however for the forum posts this would result in my sending empty content.
> this last time, I used the g for get, and the content, remained or I
> believe it did.
> Can someone give me some clarification on what is going on so i can
> insure my  writing posts, and only once?

The HTTP standard requires that normal redirects should use the same 
method as the original request.  The intended semantics of POST are that 
it causes a change in the state of the destination, e.g. the submission 
of article.

A lot of sites complete a posting by redirecting to a results page, 
however this would normally be with a temporary redirect.

As I remember it, they used to rely on mis-implementations in browsers 
that meant that the redirect was treated as a redirect to a GET (which 
is not supposed to have any effect on the state of the server).  As a 
result, a new status code was added in HTTP/1.1 which specifically says 
redirect using the GET method, regardless of that used for the original 
request.

Lynx is asking you whether you want the correct behaviour, which may 
result in a re-submission, whether you want to see the URL, so that you 
can make an informed decision, or whether you want the relatively safe 
approach of using GET, which may result in nothing happening.

As I said, this normally applies for a temporary redirect.  If the site 
is using a permanent redirect it is probably buggy, as it should mean 
that it gave out an incorrect URL, when it should have known the correct 
URL, or that it should really have been using a temporary redirect 
(browsers are allowed, even expected, to remember permanent redirects 
and apply them internally for subsequent requests).  As such, you really 
need to understand what it was actually trying to do.  I would hope that 
modern browsers would honour HTTP and use POST, especially for 301.