Re: About that Host: header....

> Discussion:
> 
> I personally see only options 2 and 4 having a high likelyhood of
> the "correct outcome" allowing multiple sites to be served from the
> same server, within finite time of starting to transition to 1.1.  I
> believe the W.G. needs to select either 2 or 4 to resolve this
> issue.
> 
> There was a statement by Ari Luotonen at the IETF meeting that he
> believed that solution 2) to be unacceptable to Netscape.  Ari, is
> this true now that you've had time to think about it?  Paul, can you
> see what Microsoft's opinion on this topic is?

Yes, 2 is unacceptable.  We'd be breaking the entire universe, or
making an ugly kludge if we then require a retry with 1.0 if and when
the server doesn't accept the 1.1 request.  Furthermore, HTTP/1.x is
defined to be backword and forward compatible with other HTTP/1.x, so
even in that light this would be unacceptable, because a valid
HTTP/1.1 request would not yield a correct response from a HTTP/1.0
server.

Making the Host: header a _required_ header in HTTP/1.1 clearly solves
the problem, and is painless, with no interoperability problems.  How
you choose to enforce it I don't really have a strong opinion about
(error msg vs ignore); I don't think an error response should be
required from servers that don't exploit the Host: header, but it
would be fine for servers that serve multiple domains.

Cheers,
--
Ari Luotonen				ari@netscape.com
Netscape Communications Corp.		http://home.netscape.com/people/ari/
685 East Middlefield Road
Mountain View, CA 94043, USA		Netscape Server Development Team