[Web-SIG] http content-location header, and different browsers

[Carlos Ribeiro]

On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 13:55:16 +0200, Irmen de Jong <irmen at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> Hello all,
> I was just trying some new code I was writing for Snakelets with
> different browsers, and stumbled across something weird.
> It has to do with the HTTP Content-Location header.
> 
> What I used to do was adding a Content-Location header in the
> reply, when the page was internally redirected in Snakelets.
> (I thought this was a good idea, based on what I knew about
> the meaning of that header). Everything worked fine. Until I
> opened my website with Opera, instead of Firefox or IE....:
> a few of my links had totally wrong URLs in Opera!
> 
> After a bit of searching I now know that at least Opera implements
> the HTTP specification, which says in
> http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.14
> that "The value of Content-Location also defines the base URI
> for the entity." So Opera was -rightfully so- using the value
> of the content-location header as the new base URI, and the
> other browsers I tried *do not do that*. Firefox has a WONTFIX-bug
> on this (bugzilla #109553) because they feel that it would break
> a lot of websites that supply faulty content-location headers.
> 
> In the end, I decided to just not generate this header anymore.
> And my site started working in Opera too ;-)
> 
> What do you think of this?

I have limited experience with this. But if Firefox guys decided it
wasnt worth fixing, they're probably correct. God knows how much email
(and bug tickets) they get when something they do works differently
from IE or other 'mainstream' browsers.

BTW... did you try it in Opera using their IE-emulation mode?

-- 
Carlos Ribeiro
Consultoria em Projetos
blog: http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com
blog: http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com
mail: carribeiro at gmail.com
mail: carribeiro at yahoo.com