Concurrent non-error response disallowed. ("clarification of 7.2.2. Monitoring Connections for Error Status Messages")

This email is a follow-up to the previous thread - "clarification of
7.2.2. Monitoring Connections for Error Status Messages". Thanks for
all the replies!

We seem to agree that "concurrent" non-error response is NOT
compatible with the spec, on the following grounds:

1. a non-error response status implies/requires the server seeing the
complete request body.
==> 200 status doesn't necessarily guarantee a complete/successful
response end-to-end, due to interim server-processing or communication
failure (Wenbo Zhu).

2. existing clients won't be able to handle concurrent non-error
responses, i.e. when the request is still in transmission.
==> some clients do seem to "work" (Jamie Lokier)

3. proxies may have problems to continue transmitting request data
after the response arrives.
==> most of them are able to handle response data when the request is
still in transmission (Henrik Nordström)

However, as Mark Nottingham pointed out at the same time, the above
interpretation isn't explicitly supported by the current
specification. Therefore I suggest the spec include a clear
clarification on the requirement that concurrent non-error responses
are disallowed, to avoid possible ambiguity.

- Wenbo

Received on Friday, 14 May 2010 07:13:43 UTC