Re: questions and comments about the Warning header

Jeffrey Mogul writes:
 >     The comment first: is there any reasons why the 'Warning' header is
 >     not stated in any of the {general,request,reply,entity}-headers
 >     (resp. sections 4.5, 5.3, 6.2 and 7.1). I think it's the only missing
 >     from the above lists (as far as I can tell), and I was wondering if
 >     there was some purpose behind this ?
 > 
 > Probably an oversight.  It looks like it should be a response-header
 > (section 6.2).

It's really nice to have all the headers available in these four
sections. I think the Warning was the only was missing (I didn't
cross-checked).

 >     The question: reading section 14.45 (and particularly the BNF), it is
 >     unclear to me that I am allowed to fold multiple Warning headers
 >     together (despite the text in section 2.2: "HTTP/1.1 headers can be
 >     folded onto multiple lines if the continuation line begins with a
 >     space or horizontal tab"). 
 >     
 > First of all, I think the folding rule in 2.2 applies to the
 > representation of a single header, not to the combination of
 > two different ones.
 > 
 > You probably should have quoted this from section 4.2:
 > 
 >     It MUST be
 >     possible to combine the multiple header fields into one "field-name:
 >     field-value" pair, without changing the semantics of the message, by
 >     appending each subsequent field-value to the first, each separated by a
 >     comma.

Oops,correct.

 > This suggests that the BNF for Warning is indeed subtly wrong.  It
 > now is
 > 
 >        Warning    = "Warning" ":" warn-code SP warn-agent SP warn-text
 >        warn-code  = 2DIGIT
 >        warn-agent = ( host [ ":" port ] ) | pseudonym
 >                        ; the name or pseudonym of the server adding
 >                        ; the Warning header, for use in debugging
 >        warn-text  = quoted-string
 > 
 > and I guess it should be
 > 
 >        Warning    = "Warning" ":" 1#warning-value
 >        warning-value = warn-code SP warn-agent SP warn-text
 >        warn-code  = 2DIGIT
 >        warn-agent = ( host [ ":" port ] ) | pseudonym
 >                        ; the name or pseudonym of the server adding
 >                        ; the Warning header, for use in debugging
 >        warn-text  = quoted-string

Yes, this is what I would like it to be,

Thanks for your attention,
Anselm.

Received on Thursday, 6 June 1996 16:19:32 UTC