Re: Claification requested in Host:

> From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@kiwi.ICS.UCI.EDU>
> 
> >How does a proxy handle this?
> >This seems like something that should be nailed down in the 1.1 spec.
> >
> >Consider:
> >
> >	client xxx.foo.com requests 
> >		url http://www/file.html 
> >		from proxy proxy.com
> >
> >	proxy.com gets request, and looks up what?


> That is an implementation issue on the client side.  Yes, it is the
> only implementation that make sense, but it is independent of HTTP
> in the same way that DNS is independent of HTTP.
> 
> >The 1.1 spec should require complete names,
> 
> No. The 1.1 spec should not require that a client never do something
> which does work under some circumstances, just because it doesn't work
> in all circumstances.  If the client requests on an ambiguous URL,
> it will get an ambiguous response behavior, which is as it should be.

The 1.1 spec says, in sec. 3.2.2:

   The "http" scheme is used to locate network resources via the HTTP
   protocol. This section defines the scheme-specific syntax and
   semantics for http URLs.

          http_URL       = "http:" "//" host [ ":" port ] [ abs_path ]

          host           = <A legal Internet host domain name
                            or IP address (in dotted-decimal form),
                            as defined by Section 2.1 of RFC 1123>

foo is not a legal internet host domain name, in that case.

> In any case, this is a question of how to interpret the DNS hostname
> within an "http" URL, and applies equally to any URL scheme that uses DNS.

Yes, and since the 1.1 spec makes a statement about it, it should
be addressed. Or the reference to URL parsing should be removed, and
pointed to the URL RFC.

This is the bug in the spec to which I refer.

Joe

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Touch - touch@isi.edu		    http://www.isi.edu/~touch/
ISI / Project Leader, ATOMIC-2, LSAM       http://www.isi.edu/atomic2/
USC / Research Assistant Prof.                http://www.isi.edu/lsam/

Received on Wednesday, 19 February 1997 12:54:48 UTC