Certain UAs should provide redirect management

Problem statement / use cases

For UAs that maintain URI history or URI bookmarks and encounter redirects whether provided through HTTP’s 301 status code or HTML meta elements:

• authors may provide only temporary redirection for a permanently moved resource (whether intentional or inadvertently as http servers are rebuilt or replaced) eventually only providing a resource in response to a direct request to the new URI
• regarding redirects users may receive insufficient information to maintain history, bookmarks, and other URI data
• authors cannot determine how much of a timeout users (including users with disabilities) may require before performing a redirect
• requiring authors to handle accessibility issues largely beyond their control is a hardship while the issue can easily be handled by an interactive UA
• redirects involve additional network overhead and compounded latency that could be avoided by keeping client URI data fresh

Proposed solutions

back/forward history

UAs that maintain a back/forward history must update the original request URI with the redirect URI.

Modal/non modal alert

Interactive UAs that encounter a redirect should provide the user with a modal or non-modal alert indicating that a redirect has been performed. In cases where the original URI is maintained as a bookmark for the user, the UA should either interactively offer to update the bookmark on behalf of the user or do so automatically.

Optional UA URI search

UAs may provide users with information in browser history about redirects (e.g., allowing users to find history results from either the original or the redirected URI and document title)

Perhaps adding new http-equiv content syntax

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.indiana.edu/~smithclas/l200/;permanent" >

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.indiana.edu/~smithclas/l200/;moved-until=2008-07-01T13:38Z" >

or

<meta http-equiv="refresh-perm" content="0;URL=http://www.indiana.edu/~smithclas/l200/" >

Discussion and evaluation

Advice from authorities

• WCAG checkpoint 3.5

Email

WG members should post feedback and other discussion to the WG’s list serve (the URI for the links below provides date information). Search on this email subject.

• initial wiki issue email (Robert Burns)
• thread on meta redirects

See also

• HTTP/1.1 section 10.3 Redirection 3xx