Re: Last-Modified in chunked footer

Scott Lawrence:
>
>  In principle, I would have supported the less restrictive rule that
>  any header field can be sent in the trailer unless it is
>  specifically required to be in the header, but I think it is very
>  late in the game to be changing the rules on the client developers
>  now.

I agree.  I propose that we put a list of `headers which may be in the
footer' in the 1.1 spec.  We can further add a note to future protocol
authors, telling them that whenever they define a header which is
allowed in the footer of a HTTP/1.1 message, they should explicitely
say so, because the HTTP/1.1 default is to disallow a header to be in
the footer.

Did we already discuss the problem of a proxy which gets a chunked 1.1
response and forwards it unchunked to a 1.0 recipient?  It seems to me
that, if we don't define something different explicitely, this proxy
would be obliged to move all chunked footer-headers to the 1.0 message
header before forewarding the response as a 1.0 response.  This
obligation would be a pain because it requires buffering of the whole
response.  So we should either allow a proxy to drop the
footer-headers when converting to 1.0, or there should at least be some
advance notification that these headers will be present, so that
buffering can be avoided most of the time.  The first alternative
seems best to me.

>Scott Lawrence           EmWeb Embedded Server       <lawrence@agranat.com>
>Agranat Systems, Inc.        Engineering            http://www.agranat.com/

Koen.

Received on Monday, 8 September 1997 12:26:23 UTC