Re: About that Host: header....

> 
> On Sat, 23 Mar 1996, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> 
> > Hmmmm, not quite.  It is okay for the WG to propose an incompatible change
> > to the HTTP protocol for the proposed standard.  It is not okay to do so
> > without indicating it through a change to the HTTP major protocol version
> > number.  The ability of a client to send a full URL to the origin server 
> > is an incompatible change, even when it is optional.
Alaxei Kosut adds:
> I don't see this as an incompatible change, assuming wording is put into
> the spec along the lines of the following: "A client may not send request
> to an HTTP server using a full URL in the request until it has determined
> that the server is compatible with HTTP/1.1 or later."
> 
> If it is required that HTTP/1.1 servers support full URL requests, then
> once a client has sent a partial URL request to a server, and gotten back
> a response tagged with "HTTP/1.1", it seems to me that there is no reason
> that the next request to that server cannot be in full URL form.
> 
> Am I missing something (most likely)?

In theory Roy is right, in practice the situation is somewhat easier:
I added the following two lines to my CERN servers config file:

Map	http://gatekeeper.bne.private*	*
Map	http://bne.ind.eunet.hu*	*

and now the old 1.0 server accepts full URLs.

I guess that the NCSA server can be tricked similarly.
(NCSA gurus, is this true? And other servers can be configured in the same way?)

And going even further:
Pass	http://gatekeeper.bne.private*	/var/httpd/htdocs/internal*
Pass	http://bne.ind.eunet.hu*	/var/httpd/htdocs/public*
Pass	http://www.CareNet.hu*		/var/httpd/htdocs/company*

... and the CERN server goes virtual!

Almost all servers have some mapping rules from web (URL) name space to 
filesystem name space, and using full URLs instead of Host: may give us 
more benefits!

Andrew. (Endre Balint Nagy) <bne@bne.ind.eunet.hu>

Received on Sunday, 24 March 1996 15:08:32 UTC