Navigator & the closed socket (was: POST forms & Netscape Navigator)

Inigo Lopez wrote:
> 
> En fecha/On Thu, 25 Jul 1996 12:10:01 +0100  Matthew Denner expuso/wrote:
> 
> > > You do have to read and parse the Content-Length to determine how much data
> > > to read. Doing the keep-alive is optional if you're doing a HTTP/1.0
> > > server. It's not part of the "standard" part of RFC 1945. It is the default
> > > for HTTP/1.1 which means as a server you must always send a valid Content-Length
> > > when sending an entity body to the client.
> > >
> >
> > The keep-alive header isn't implemented properly in Netscape as far as I
> > can
> > tell.  The connection is continually closed by Navigator after just one
> > request.
> > But I'm not sure on this as it could be my programming.
> 
> I have been playing around a bit and have found out the following. I am not
> really
> sure of this, so my apologies if I am wrong.
> The keep-alive header really does not work properly in Netscape v2.0 and even
> in v3.0 beta 5.
> 
> Netscape first opens a connection and sends an HTTP request. The server sends
> an
> HTTP response containing an HTML page with (maybe) some inline images. Netscape
> does NOT close the connection but opens a new connection to the server for each
> inline image it needs. After it has received all the images, it closes all the
> connections. This happens even if the server responds with HTTP/1.1 and
> Connection: keep-alive.
> 

This is the behaviour I am seeing (glad it isn't my code for once :)  I
find
that Navigator 2.02 to 3.0 beta 5 all say that the connection will
remain alive
but close it as soon as the transaction is complete.  However, by their
header
they openly admit that they are HTTP/1.0 compliant and therefore do not
really
need to implement the 'Keep-Alive' connection.

> Is this the way it is supposed to work? I guess it should:
> - close the connection after each HTTP response (not using keep-alive)
> or
> - use the same connection for all HTTP requests.

The purpose of keep-alive is to allow pipelined responses and to prevent
the
need for making too many connections.

> 
> I hope this helps some way. And please, correct me if I am wrong.
> 

Yes, and you're not as far as I can tell.

Matt

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Matthew Denner  			email:	matt@wdi.co.uk
Senior Programmer			tel:	(+44)(0) 1305 871 543
Abbotsbury Software Ltd			fax:	(+44)(0) 1305 871 688
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Received on Thursday, 25 July 1996 12:20:21 UTC