Re: domain-name?

> Most importantly, Phillip M. Hallam-Baker mentioned needing the URI for the
> keyed digest authentication scheme... I'm not sure if this is still an
> issue... perhaps he could comment.

There is no reason why digest authentication can't reconstruct the
original URL from its four parts: http:// or https:// prefix
(implicitly known to the server), contents of Host:, possibly
non-default port number (implicitly known), and the path info passed
in the request.

> A couple of people mentioned interaction with proxies, either that Orig-URI
> could be used by proxies or that it was useful to have the URI unmodified
> by proxies (I guess URN resolution would be a related case to this.)

Intermediate proxies shouldn't modify the URL encoding when forwarding
the request.  Netscape proxy doesn't, and if I recall, CERN doesn't
either (at least I didn't mean it to, but it may have been broken in
3.0 after I left, but I think there's a patch for it, too).  A much
more useful thing to do in the spec would be to require proxies to
leave the URL pathinfo untouched.

If it really becomes an issue, then the *digest authentication* can
define its own new header, but there's no reason for *every* HTTP
request to be burdened by it.

> Someone suggested that it would be useful for more general "smart
> redirects" and that having the fragment identifier might be useful.

You can have a new header for those smart redirects, again no need to
burden every request and response with them.

So, still strongly seconding making Host: mandatory in HTTP/1.1.

Cheers,
--
Ari Luotonen				ari@netscape.com
Netscape Communications Corp.		http://home.netscape.com/people/ari/
501 East Middlefield Road
Mountain View, CA 94043, USA		Netscape Server Development Team

Received on Thursday, 21 September 1995 17:49:14 UTC