- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@liege.ICS.UCI.EDU>
- Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 18:08:42 -0700
- To: Klaus Weide <kweide@tezcat.com>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
>> CL-HTTP responds to 1.0 clients with 1.0 responses. 1.1 responses are >> reserved for clients or proxies that also advertise 1.1 functionality. > > This brings up a question - How legitimate is it for the same server > (identified ipaddress:port) to change personality between HTTP/1.1 > and HTTP/1.0? If a server answers some requests with "HTTP/1.1 200 .." > and others with "HTTP/1.0 200 .." (or any other response code), this > may confuse HTTP/1.1-aware clients. Well, there's no requirement against it (because that particular confusion is harmless -- if it ever understands HTTP/1.1 then it is safe to send HTTP/1.1-only features to it). The intention of the protocol is that the server should always respond with the highest minor version of the protocol it understands within the same major version of the client's request message. The restriction is that the server cannot use those optional features of the higher-level protocol which are forbidden to be sent to such an older-version client. [BTW, there are no required features of a protocol that cannot be used with all other minor versions within that major version, since that would be an incompatible change and thus require a change in the major version.] It sounds confusing, but it works in terms of providing a safe mechanism of indicating and deploying future protocol changes. ...Roy T. Fielding Department of Information & Computer Science (fielding@ics.uci.edu) University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-3425 fax:+1(714)824-4056 http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/
Received on Thursday, 15 August 1996 18:16:50 UTC