Re: What is Content-Length?

  This is getting out of hand.  We have multiple interoperable
  implementations in which the current definition of content length
  and its interaction with transfer encoding has been shown to work.
  However flawed it may be in some theoretical sense, it does work and
  should not be changed, nor should any other header to carry a length
  be added, unless it can be shown that it actual practice something
  is broken.

  As for the digest authentication entity digest, the content length
  is not one of the elements that presents a problem, since it does
  not change based on the transfer encoding.  If the digest
  information is sent in a chunked trailer then the length is known at
  the time the entity-digest is computed, even if it was not known
  when the headers were sent (in which case there is no Content-Length
  header field).  We do have some _other_ problems to resolve with the
  entity-digest calculation in face of proxies adding headers, but
  this is not one of them.

--
Scott Lawrence           EmWeb Embedded Server       <lawrence@agranat.com>
Agranat Systems, Inc.        Engineering            http://www.agranat.com/

Received on Thursday, 11 December 1997 07:03:16 UTC