Content-* Semantics [i103]

Now <http://www3.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/103>.

I very nearly made this an editorial issue, but I thought that it  
would be good to get general agreement that Content-* is *not*  
constrained to just those headers defined by RFC2616. Anyone have a  
problem with that?



On 17/02/2008, at 3:32 AM, Brian Smith wrote:

>
> Julian Reschke wrote:
>> Brian Smith wrote:
>>> Actually, this is wishful thinking on my part. HTTPbis should have
>>> that requirement that Content-* cannot be ignored for any
>>> method that uses a request body (especially POST), but RFC 2616
>>> only has the requirement for PUT. Can a new issue be created for
>>> that?
>>
>> Why would that have anything to do with the presence of a
>> request body?
>
> A server processing a GET or DELETE can ignore all Content-* headers  
> in
> the request, because the the request body doesn't have any semantics  
> for
> GET and DELETE, and Content-* describe the request's entity.
>
> POST, PUT, and PATCH cannot ignore Content-* headers in the request
> because those Content-* headers are needed to understand the request
> body enough to process it--especially Content-Range and
> Content-Encoding.
>
> Another issue is "What does Content-*" mean? Does it mean all headers
> prefixed with "Content-", or just those headers prefixed by "Content-"
> that are defined in RFC 2616?
>
> - Brian
>
>
>


--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/