- From: Scott Lawrence <lawrence@agranat.com>
- Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 10:22:42 -0400
- To: HTTP Working Group <http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Klaus Weide <kweide@tezcat.com> provides us with traces showing two deployed proxy implementations that plainly do not send correct HTTP version numbers on thier forwarded responses, and suggests a modification to 1.1 to provide a way to detect this broken behaviour so that correct implementations can work through it. Those implementations are and always have been _broken_. They plainly do not conform to the specifications, and should be fixed and replaced. It is true that as 1.1 origin servers and especially 1.1 clients come into wider use, these broken 1.0 proxies will begin to cause problems; the client users will generally be the ones to suffer for it. With IE4 preview versions being distributed I expect that this is already happening. If I were implementing a 1.1 browser, I would spend a few minutes adding an interface that used TRACE or OPTIONS to at least help users discover what the problem really is, and I'd put up some help pages about it (on 1.0 servers :-). Then I'd add a link on the help pages to my (correct) proxy product so that users could complain to the adminstrator of the firewall or ISP whose broken proxy they are stuck behind. In short, view this as a sales opportunity. These non-conforming proxies are no reason to do anything at all to the definition of HTTP. -- Scott Lawrence EmWeb Embedded Server <lawrence@agranat.com> Agranat Systems, Inc. Engineering http://www.agranat.com/
Received on Sunday, 10 August 1997 07:22:40 UTC