HTTP HEAD verb's status code

Question

According to the RFC http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html:

The HEAD method is identical to GET except that the server MUST NOT return a message-body in the response. The metainformation contained in the HTTP headers in response to a HEAD request SHOULD be identical to the information sent in response to a GET request. This method can be used for obtaining metainformation about the entity implied by the request without transferring the entity-body itself. This method is often used for testing hypertext links for validity, accessibility, and recent modification.

The response to a HEAD request MAY be cacheable in the sense that the information contained in the response MAY be used to update a previously cached entity from that resource. If the new field values indicate that the cached entity differs from the current entity (as would be indicated by a change in Content-Length, Content-MD5, ETag or Last-Modified), then the cache MUST treat the cache entry as stale.

From this definition, should we have to return 200 such as the respective GET action, of should we have to return 204 because there is no content?

Personally, I think the better interpretation would be to use 204 status code. What is your interpretation?

Answer 1

See Section 10, which describes the status codes. The description of code 200 includes examples, and they include HEAD. So obviously they intend that the HEAD request should return this code.

The description of 204 explains the purpose:

This response is primarily intended to allow input for actions to take place without causing a change to the user agent's active document view, although any new or updated metainformation SHOULD be applied to the document currently in the user agent's active view.