Content-Length and GET request

• From: Scott Nichol <snicholnews@scottnichol.com>
• Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:50:20 -0500
• To: <www-talk@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <0f3501c832a7$fcde8d70$6601a8c0@GT5056>

The current HTTP 1.1 spec revision 
(http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/1.1/rfc2616bis/draft-lafon-rfc2616bis-03.txt) 
states in section 4.3

<quote>
The presence of a message-body in a request is signaled by the
   inclusion of a Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding header field in
   the request's message-headers. A message-body MUST NOT be included
   in a request if the specification of the request method
   (Section 5.1.1) does not allow sending an entity-body in requests.
</quote>

Based on my understanding of HTTP, I would assume this means that a GET 
request cannot have a Content-Length header.  However, I cannot find any 
place in the spec that says the GET request method does not allow 
sending of an entity-body.

Am I missing something in the spec?

Does a GET request allow an entity-body?

Scott Nichol 

Received on Thursday, 29 November 2007 17:58:55 UTC