03 April 2009

Content-Location HTTP header for current URL

All our web sites on shared host provider Crystaltech/Newtek have just started serving an extra HTTP header Content-Location for all static web page requests - the header contains the current URL.

To see this in action, use Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer to view this page at our web site: http://www.phdcc.com/phd.html.

If you look in the received output, you will see that the Content-Location header is set to the requested URL:
Content-Location:·http://www.phdcc.com/phd.html(CR)(LF)

Normally, the Content-Location header is used to indicate when the content actually corresponds to another URL. So if you look at http://www.phdcc.com/ you will see this output:
Content-Location:·http://www.phdcc.com/default.htm(CR)(LF)
ie the web site home page is actually called default.htm.

While this is a harmless change for most users, it did in fact fool our FindinSite-MS search engine - I am in the process of releasing a new version to cope with this. Our ISP Crystaltech claims that nothing has changed. Has anyone any further information?

2 comments:

Richard Collette said...

Curious how you resolved this. We have an issue with a particular application folder within a site returning content-location headers for static resources. The extensions are not mapped to any alternate handler and no filters are in place.

Chris Cant said...

We didn't resolve it as such - the header is still being generated. It was fooling our site search engine software, so I added some code to fix that problem. So I still don't know why the header is being generated.
Ta Chris