HTTP 302 Redirect - is a message-body needed?

Question

RFC 2616 doesn\'t specify whether a message-body is needed or not, which I interpret as being optional. Is there any practical danger in omitting a message body?

For

Answer 1

AFAICT the spec describes at least two rules:

1. HEAD requests require the response to contain a location header. HEAD responses should never contain anything in the response body.

2. GET requests require that at least a hyperlink with a description be included in the response body.

Is your plan only to populate the location header?

As to your question with respect to knowing of any practical danger of responding to a GET request with an empty body, the only problem I can forsee is a functional one, when users turn auto-redirect off. Robots will also likely expect a hyperlink. As @BalusC mentioned you may have an alternative in 204 No Content response. If say the user is changing things in your app in an ajaxy way, the client code could maintain the document and entity state and the server could respond with 204's. However now I am jumping ahead and assume I know something about your use case.