The Hypertext Transfer Protocol Status Code 308 (Permanent Redirect)
RFC 7238

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Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)                        J. Reschke
Request for Comments: 7238                                    greenbytes
Category: Experimental                                         June 2014
ISSN: 2070-1721

  The Hypertext Transfer Protocol Status Code 308 (Permanent Redirect)

Abstract

   This document specifies the additional Hypertext Transfer Protocol
   (HTTP) status code 308 (Permanent Redirect).

Status of This Memo

   This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
   published for examination, experimental implementation, and
   evaluation.

   This document defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet
   community.  This document is a product of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  It represents the consensus of the IETF
   community.  It has received public review and has been approved for
   publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG).  Not
   all documents approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of
   Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.

   Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
   and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
   http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7238.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2014 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Reschke                       Experimental                      [Page 1]
RFC 7238                  HTTP Status Code 308                 June 2014

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
   2.  Notational Conventions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
   3.  308 Permanent Redirect  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
   4.  Deployment Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
   5.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
   6.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
   7.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
   8.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
     8.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
     8.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

1.  Introduction

   HTTP defines a set of status codes for the purpose of redirecting a
   request to a different URI ([RFC3986]).  The history of these status
   codes is summarized in Section 6.4 of [RFC7231], which also
   classifies the existing status codes into four categories.

   The first of these categories contains the status codes 301 (Moved
   Permanently), 302 (Found), and 307 (Temporary Redirect), which can be
   classified as below:

   +-------------------------------------------+-----------+-----------+
   |                                           | Permanent | Temporary |
   +-------------------------------------------+-----------+-----------+
   | Allows changing the request method from   | 301       | 302       |
   | POST to GET                               |           |           |
   | Does not allow changing the request       | -         | 307       |
   | method from POST to GET                   |           |           |
   +-------------------------------------------+-----------+-----------+

   Section 6.4.7 of [RFC7231] states that HTTP does not define a
   permanent variant of status code 307; this specification adds the
   status code 308, defining this missing variant (Section 3).

2.  Notational Conventions

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

3.  308 Permanent Redirect

   The 308 (Permanent Redirect) status code indicates that the target
   resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future
   references to this resource ought to use one of the enclosed URIs.

Reschke                       Experimental                      [Page 2]
RFC 7238                  HTTP Status Code 308                 June 2014

   Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link
   references to the effective request URI (Section 5.5 of [RFC7230]) to
   one or more of the new references sent by the server, where possible.

   The server SHOULD generate a Location header field ([RFC7231],
   Section 7.1.2) in the response containing a preferred URI reference