Re: HTTP/1.1 & Proxies

I suggest you take the simple way out and make it a configuration
option, i.e., when you set up your proxy configuration, just
have a check box that either turns on HTTP/1.1 proxy interactions
or not (or, in the autoconfig script or whatever, return a different
indication for HTTP/1.1 proxying.)

Since the browsers start out initially with proxying turned off,
and the user's have to turn it on, you can explain in the user
interface with appropriate wording what the issues are, and possibly
even include some kind of auto-test that will decide what protocol
version a proxy has.

Site admins who maintain auto-proxy configuration mechanisms
will know when they upgrade from a HTTP/1.0 proxy to HTTP/1.1,
and will upgrade.

There's no point in crudding up the protocol to add workarounds
for broken implementations, and certainly it seems like a bad
idea to test dynamically for something that will happen (usually)
only once in the lifetime of the software version (namely,
the upgrade of a 1.0 proxy to 1.1).

Larry
-- 
http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter

Received on Tuesday, 1 July 1997 22:28:55 UTC