protocol/1014: Please, use Content-Location: header?

[Ka-Ping Yee <pi...@parc.xerox.com>]

>Number:         1014
>Category:       protocol
>Synopsis:       Please, use Content-Location: header?
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    apache (Apache HTTP Project)
>State:          open
>Class:          change-request
>Submitter-Id:   apache
>Arrival-Date:   Tue Aug 19 04:30:01 1997
>Originator:     ping@parc.xerox.com
>Organization:
apache
>Release:        1.2b10
>Environment:
I run Apache 1.2b10 on Linux 2.0.25, but this is a general suggestion.
>Description:
>From draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-08, page 125, section 14.15 ("Content-Location"):

    The Content-Location entity-header field MAY be used to
    supply the resource location for the entity enclosed in the
    message when that entity is accessible from a location
    separate from the requested resource's URI.

    ...a server SHOULD provide a Content-Location
    for the resource corresponding to the response entity.

I would very much like you to consider emitting a "Content-Location:"
header to help identify documents uniquely.  In particular, when the
server responds to a directory request (e.g. "/foo/") with a default page
("/foo/index.html"), it should emit the new location:

    GET /foo/ HTTP/1.0

    HTTP/1.1 200 Okay
    Content-Type: text/html
    Content-Location: http://www.apache.org/foo/index.html
    ...

There is no way for the client to infer the true location from
the response otherwise, because it cannot guess whether the
default name is "default.htm", "index.html", "welcome.html", etc.

This information can be very valuable to search engines, scripts
that do indexing, and so on.  Thank you for considering it.

(You could also provide this information when the file is a
local symbolic link to another file within the document tree,
though that would be harder.)


Ping
>How-To-Repeat:

>Fix:

>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: