ACTION: The order of HTTP Headers

According to Section 4.2 of RFC 2616 [1]

   The order in which header fields with differing field names are
   received is not significant. However, it is "good practice" to send
   general-header fields first, followed by request-header or response-
   header fields, and ending with the entity-header fields.

   Multiple message-header fields with the same field-name MAY be
   present in a message if and only if the entire field-value for that
   header field is defined as a comma-separated list [i.e., #(values)].
   It MUST be possible to combine the multiple header fields into one
   "field-name: field-value" pair, without changing the semantics of the
   message, by appending each subsequent field-value to the first, each
   separated by a comma. The order in which header fields with the same
   field-name are received is therefore significant to the
   interpretation of the combined field value, and thus a proxy MUST NOT
   change the order of these field values when a message is forwarded.

For moki, I would prefer to maintain the ordering as received. I'm not
sure that this makes it either easier or harder select values ...

e.g. //primaryDoc//HTTPResponse[last()]/header[@name="charlie"] does not
depend on the ordering ...

Jo

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-4.2

Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2007 11:43:48 UTC