- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@liege.ICS.UCI.EDU>
- Date: Fri, 28 Jun 1996 05:23:46 -0700
- To: Dave Kristol <dmk@allegra.att.com>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
> One of the reputed purposes of the TRACE method is (I believe) a
> traceroute-like mechanism through Web proxies. To that end, I think it
> would be useful if proxies added a timestamp to the Via: header that
> they add to a TRACE response. Because comments are allowed in the Via:
> syntax, this could actually be done without changing the protocol. (But
> it would be nice to permit more than one comment by changing the syntax
> from "comment" to "*comment".)
The goal was to minimize the Via syntax overhead, since it will be required
for all HTTP/1.1 intermediaries (proxies and gateways). There is
only one comment *per-entry*, and even that is discouraged. We don't
need a timestamp in general, but I suppose adding one within the
comment ONLY during TRACE requests would be good implementation advice.
...Roy T. Fielding
Department of Information & Computer Science (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
University of California, Irvine, CA 92717-3425 fax:+1(714)824-4056
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/
Received on Friday, 28 June 1996 05:45:33 UTC