Re: 1.1b3 and things???

On Sun, 9 Jun 1996, Robert S. Thau wrote:

> I'm a HTTP/1.1 client. I don't understand any of that HTTP/1.0

"for a while yet". I might point out that, for example, one out of every thirty servers still runs NCSA httpd 1.3, a server that's severely out of date, not to mention the security holes. Counting on people to upgrade servers is never a good idea.

I think saying that "well, we won't break clients for the next year or so" is *extremely* short-sighted. Because, yes, 19.7.1 does say how to be compatible with HTTP/1.0 Keep-Alive, but it's an appendix, and the words used are "may wish". Not MUST, or even SHOULD. There's nothing that says "oh, by the way, if you don't implement this, your client will hang whenever it tries to retrieve a document from the most popular server." Nor should it.

> Accordingly, I've been, assuming we'd keep on sending "Connection:

But my hypothetical client doesn't know what Connection: keep-alive means. It doesn't have to, it's not supposed to. It will be looking for two things:

1. the protocol version. If it's 1.1 or greater, it will assume a persistent connection.
2. a Connection: close header. In all actuality, it doesn't even have to look for this, because if the server's going to close the connection, it will anyway.

Now, I could be wrong, but everything I can read says that we can't give a HTTP/1.1 client a persistent connection unless they either send a "Connection: Keep-Alive" (which a lot of them are probably going to do, for compatibility with old servers), or we up our protocol number to HTTP/1.1.

Probably the best way to get around this argument is just to make ourselves compliant with HTTP/1.1, and label ourselves such. Heck, once you've got chunked content-coding support, the rest is about ten lines of code. (at least, it was in -03, I haven't looked closely at -04 for what exactly we'd have to do).

-- 
________________________________________________________________________
Alexei Kosut       The Apache HTTP Server
URL: 
http://www.nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us/~akosut/   
http://www.apache.org/

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