- From: Koen Holtman <koen@win.tue.nl>
- Date: Sun, 3 Mar 1996 23:41:27 +0100 (MET)
- To: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU>
- Cc: koen@win.tue.nl, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Roy T. Fielding: >Koen writes: >> draft-kristol-http-state-mgmt-00 is not orthogonal to the HTTP version >> number: see section 10. Servers need the version number to know >> whether they should send an old Netscape format Set-Cookie header or a >> new HTTP/1.1 Set-Cookie header. > >This won't work. For example > > 1.0 UA ---------> 1.1 Proxy ---------> 1.0 Origin Server > >will result in a 1.1 cookie being sent to a 1.0 user agent. Isn't the 1.1 proxy required to convert the 1.1 response from the server to a 1.0 response before sending it to the user agent? This conversion would presumably also convert the 1.1 cookie in the Set-Cookie header to a 1.0 cookie. At least this is how I read Section 3.1 of the draft 1.1 spec. You can argue that cookie conversion is too big a requirement to make on proxies, especially because the Netscape cookie format is not `official 1.0'. In fact, I'm wondering about this myself. We will probably at least have to change state management draft to ensure that conversion is more easy that it is now. Anyway, conversion would only affect 1.1 set-cookie headers which have max-age fields, these fields will need to be translated to expires fields to get Netscape (1.0) format cookies. A more general remark: I have been putting off thinking through 1.0<->1.1 interoperability problems for some time now. I do not want to rule out the possibility that the new 1.1 mechanisms that will be introduced (hopefully) this month, combined with the current Section 3.1, will place so much subtle conversion requirements on proxy caches that we will only ever see non-conforming 1.1 proxy caches. My plan is to start worrying about this in April. >The only features of HTTP that can depend on a minor version number >change are those that are interpreted by neighbors in the communication. I'm not sure what you means by this; I hope you don't mean "when passing on a 1.1 response to a 1.0 client, a proxy may convert the 1.1 response to a 1.0 response by rewriting the version number in the response status line". > ...Roy T. Fielding Koen.
Received on Sunday, 3 March 1996 14:45:28 UTC