- From: Jeffrey Mogul <mogul@pa.dec.com>
- Date: Wed, 11 Jun 97 11:32:43 MDT
- To: Sami Iren <iren@cis.udel.edu>
- Cc: http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com
How does HTTP 1.1 behave when a user decides to cancel
loading a page while some elements of the page (e.g., images)
are still in transit? Does it close the connection, or is
there another mechanism to cancel the transmission of data
which has been submitted to the transport layer without
closing the connection?
The only mechanism supported by the HTTP/1.1 spec for aborting
a request in progress is to close the transport connection.
I tried arguing, about a year ago, that we could do better than
this by using the TCP urgent-pointer mechanism (or its equivalent
in any other transport protocol, not that anyone actually uses
anything besides TCP). However, implementers who were stuck with
poor implementations of TCP argued against this, and I gave up.
We'll see, once HTTP/1.1 is widely deployed, if this decision
was a mistake. It's too late to change this aspect of the
HTTP/1.1 proposal now.
-Jeff
Received on Wednesday, 11 June 1997 11:40:19 UTC