URI Dereferencing is the process of looking up a URI on the Web in order to get information about the referenced resource. The W3C’s Dereferencing HTTP URIs distinguished between how URIs identifying information and non-information resources are dereferenced:

1. Information Resources: When a URI identifying an information resource is dereferenced, the server of the URI owner usually generates a new representation, a new snapshot of the information resource’s current state, and sends it back to the client using the HTTP response code 200 OK.

2. Non-Information Resources: Cannot be dereferenced directly, so instead of sending a representation of the resource, the server sends the client the URI of a information resource which described the non-information resource using the HTTP response code 303 See Other. This is called a “303 redirect”. In a second step, the client dereferences this new URI and gets a representation describing the original non-information resource.