Re: HTTP redirects, Location: header, and IE5 problems

I'm not seeing the behaviour you're describing, and none of my clients are complaining about it either <? header("Location: http://www.php.net") ?> for example, works fine for me in various versions of IE, including 5.01 and 5.5 Try http://jason.qgl.org/redirect.html - it contains the above bit of php jason > I have been frustrated recently working with IE5.01+ and > HTTP redirects. In PHP, these are most easily done with > the header("Location: $url"); call, which magically updates > the HTTP return code and everything. :-) > > So the problem is that Internet Explorer v. 5 and above > are just returning Error - Page Not Found when given data > like this. What is going on? > > At present, it looks to me like the problem is that IE5.01 > and IE5.5 are set to default not to honor the HTTP/1.0 spec, > and take absolute URLs in the Location header. Instead, > they display an error. If they are given a *relative* URL, > then they are OK. > > Can anyone confirm this as a general observation, or even > more specifically? Can IE5 be set not to ignore the specification > for HTTP headers? I have observed this broken behavior with > IE5.5 on two other sites besides those of mine which try to > do redirects. One looks like it uses Python to issue redirects > and the other uses Perl, so I think this is an issue with Explorer. > > As a workaround, Netscape seems to accept relative > paths in the Location header, so that is the indicated > thing. (I guess if you want to do off-site redirects, you > have to find some other mechanism. Perhaps the > HTTP/1.1 Content-location header? I'm not sure...) > > -Greg Billock