Persistent and Keep-Alive in HTTP/1.1

I still don't understand the point of having both Connection:
Persistent and Connection: Keep-Alive (not to mention "Connection:
keep-alive, persistent").  Having carefully read section E.2.5 and
E.2.5.1 I understand that the chunked encoding may be used with
persistent but not with keep-alive.  This seems to be the only
difference.

Since persistent connections are one hop phenomena and every
client/server/proxy knows whether its immediate neighbor is talking
1.0 or 1.1, why couldn't we always use use "keep-alive" to indicate a
persistent connection.  It seems like both ends of a transaction will
know if the chunked encoding is allowed since they know whether they
are speaking 1.1 or later.  Chunked is required for 1.1 and not
available for 1.0.  It seems redundant and obscure to code an "it's ok
to use chunked" message in the Connection header since isn't needed
anyway.

Is there something I am missing here?



John Franks 	Dept of Math. Northwestern University
		john@math.nwu.edu

Received on Wednesday, 1 May 1996 20:34:48 UTC