- From: Eric W. Sink <eric@rafiki.spyglass.com>
- Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 10:16:56 -0500
- To: Dave Kristol <dmk@allegra.att.com>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
There's a slight syntactic difference between your implementation and the one we've done between Spyglass and NCSA. Just as an FYI: here's a copy of a mail I sent recently which explains how our implementations work. I'm also exchanging mails with Alex Hopmann to try and resolve the syntactic differences there as well. Both your implementation and Alex's draft specify a multipart response as an alternative to an accurate Content-length. That's fine -- we just have implemented it yet. -- Here's how current implementations work. NCSA Mosaic 2.6, NCSA HTTPd 1.5, and Enhanced Mosaic 2.1 all support this and interoperate together, and all implementations were done independently. We didn't share code with NCSA at all. Information on the NCSA implementation is at http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/beta-1.5/ http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/beta-1.5/howto/KeepAlive.html If the client wants the connection kept alive, it sends the following header with its request: Connection: Keep-Alive If the server recognizes this and wants to leave the connection open, it sends back: Connection: Keep-Alive It may only send this header back if the it also sends back a Content-Length header which the client may assume to be accurate. If the connection is left open, then the client may send more requests along the same connection. Any time the Connection: Keep-Alive header is sent and received back, then the connection should stay open. The NCSA 1.5 server implementation also sends back Keep-Alive: timeout=n, max=m but Enhanced Mosaic 2.1 ignores these. -- Eric W. Sink Senior Software Engineer, Spyglass eric@spyglass.com All opinions expressed here are my own.
Received on Monday, 21 August 1995 08:19:20 UTC