- From: Dave Kristol <dmk@bell-labs.com>
- Date: Tue, 09 Dec 1997 20:50:06 -0500
- To: Paul Leach <paulle@microsoft.com>
- Cc: John Franks <john@math.nwu.edu>, Jim Gettys <jg@pa.dec.com>, Eric_Houston/CAM/Lotus@lotus.com, Scott Lawrence <lawrence@agranat.com>, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Paul Leach wrote: > There are two ways to fix the problem -- > 1. Say that origin servers can't omit the headers > 2. Say that proxies can't add them when using Message Disgest. > > I don't know which is best. For Date, at least, it seems silly to omit it. I think we're looking at the problem from different directions. A *sender* produces an entity-digest. I look at the problem from the perspective of an origin server *receiving* the entity-digest. In this case the sender is a client (user-agent), possibly doing a PUT or POST. Clients seldom send Date. Proxies could (conceivably) add them. I like Benjamin Franz's suggestion of a fixed date that means "this is not a date" as a placeholder. Content-length is another matter. If the client sends the entity with chunked encoding, it probably does not know the content length, although it may calculate an entity-digest on the fly (and add it as a trailer?). But the proxy may coalesce the entity and add a Content-length header. Now what? The entity-digest as calculated by the two parties will be different because of the Content-length. Dave Kristol
Received on Tuesday, 9 December 1997 17:33:40 UTC