response w/o content-length

• From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@kiwi.ics.uci.edu>
• Date: Sat, 09 Aug 1997 02:14:38 -0700
• To: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
• Message-Id: <9708090234.aa10357@paris.ics.uci.edu>

>The question was whether a 1.0 response w/o content length had to 
>be fixed up by a proxy .... my interpretation is that there are
>three choices:
>
>1.  Accumulate the body and create a correct content-length before
>    forwarding.
>2.  Add a cunked transfer encoding header and accumulate chunks
>    and forward then with proper length fields
>3.  Don't report the response as HTTP/1.1 in the status line
>
>All of this of course presumes that the request was HTTP/1.1.

I truly wish people would check the specification before making
such interpretations.  An HTTP/1.1 response is not required to have
a content-length or a transfer-encoding.  A response without one of
those length indicators is, as in HTTP/1.0, delimited by closing the
connection.  See section 4.4 of RFC 2068.

....Roy

Received on Saturday, 9 August 1997 02:36:53 UTC