HTTP 303

According to RFC 7231, which obsoletes RFC 2616, "A 303 response to a GET request indicates that the origin server does not have a representation of the target resource that can be transferred by the server over HTTP.

If a server responds to a POST or other non-idempotent request with a 303 See Other response and a value for the location header, the client is expected to obtain the resource mentioned in the location header using the GET method; to trigger a request to the target resource using the same method, the server is expected to provide a 307 Temporary Redirect response.

Instead the server would issue a 303 See Other response which redirected to a separate URI providing a description of the person Alice.

For example, when building an HTTP-based web API that needs to respond to the caller immediately but continue executing asynchronously (such as a long-lived image conversion), the web API can provide a status check URI that allows the original client who requested the conversion to check on the conversion's status.

This status check web API might itself return 303 See Other to the requestor when the task has completed, with a link to a URI from which to retrieve the result in the Location HTTP header field.