Re: 204/205 Text nit

My understanding:

A 204 response does not carry a representation.

A 205 response does carry a representation; the representation data
must be empty.

A 204 response may or may not contain Transfer-Encoding/Content-Length
headers; they will be ignored by client anyway, so it's better not to
include them (not even a Content-Length:0 header)

A 205 response must not contain a Transfer-Encoding (otherwise the
message body cannot be empty). The 205 response must
1. either contain a "Content-Length:0" header
2. or be terminated by closing the connection

(Note that 205 responses can still transmit non-trivial
representations, through crafted Content-Type and Content-Encoding.
That's probably not intended.)

Zhong Yu


On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 4:04 PM, Nathan <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:
> From p2-semantics, v21:
>
>    The 204 response MUST NOT include a message body, and thus is always
>    terminated by the first empty line after the header fields.
>
> ...
>
> 7.3.6.  205 Reset Content
>
>    The message body included with the response MUST be empty.  Note that
>    receivers still need to parse the response according to the algorithm
>    defined in Section 3.3 of [Part1].
>
> Are both bits of text trying to say the same thing, should they use the same
> text?
>
> Best,
>
> Nathan
>

Received on Monday, 22 October 2012 02:44:15 UTC