Transfer-Encoding: questions not answered

Scanning some back email, I found these questions that I had posed about
Transfer-Encoding, but that I don't think got answered.

1)  Should the [HTTP/1.2] specification state when "chunked" must and
must not be used?  Although there's no consensus session/keepalive
proposal, obviously any content sent from the server to the client for
a held-open connection must either have a Content-Length or be
chunked for the connection to remain open.

2) Can a client send chunked content in a POST in lieu of a
Content-Length, or even with a C-L?  (And what does it mean to have
both, especially if they disagree?)

3) If (2) is true, does the CGI interface change to require a CGI script
to interpret T-E, or does the interface stay the same, and the server
processes the chunked content and passes the concatenated chunks to the
CGI?  If the latter, is it valid for the server to forge a Content-Length
header for the CGI to use to read the concatenated content where none
existed previously?
[As Larry Masinter pointed out, the CGI interface is outside the scope of
this list, but changes to HTTP can affect it.]

Dave Kristol

Received on Friday, 18 August 1995 08:29:43 UTC