Re: Status: -> Progress:
George Phillips <phillips@cs.ubc.ca>
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Date: Tue, 10 May 1994 10:34:02 +0200
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From: George Phillips <phillips@cs.ubc.ca>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Status: -> Progress:
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Paul Wain said:
>In the case of what we are doing here, it would be nice to send back
>these Status/Progress reports _BUT_ the search isnt sure of the correct
>HTTP response code when it starts. The response code depends on the
>results of the search. (eg: 200 is OK, 302 is a referal for correct
>retrival later on, 40x is a failure etc.)
A way around this is to have a "message/http-response" (or whatever)
Content-Type that identifies the body as a HTTP/1.0 response. With
that available, you can do stuff like:
HTTP/1.0 200 Document Follows
MIME-Version: 1.0
Status: Half-way there, sport
Status: All done
Content-Type: message/http-response
HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Location: http://...../
MIME-Version: 1.0
This can be compatible with old browsers since the new ones will
indicate compatibility with "Accept: message/http-response". I recon
libWWW can be hacked to handle the new type fairly easily -- just
a matter of massaging the HTTP handling code into a stream module.
I think "message/http-reponse" would be quite a useful addition
for the people writing HTTP <-> mail gateways, proxys and caching
servers.
I'd say this is a reasonable way to extend the simple status reporting.
Does "message/http-response" exist? If not, is "message/http-response"
the right name?