- From: Dave Kristol <dmk@research.bell-labs.com>
- Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 11:48:49 -0400 (EDT)
- To: http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com
The LPWA proxy truncates the Referer header, in most cases, to read
Referer:
with no value, and therefore violates the HTTP/1.1 specification.
I received a report about a site that didn't work with the LPWA HTTP
proxy. After much investigation, I discovered that the site's server
software was barfing because Referer had no value. Add a value, or
remove the header altogether, and their server worked okay.
I was all set to go off in high dudgeon about how the specification
*says* that headers that aren't understood should be ignored. What it
says (7.1 Entity Header Fields) is that "unrecognized header fields
SHOULD be ignored...."
The question I have is, what does "unrecognized" mean? Does it just
mean a header whose name is unfamiliar, or does it also mean a
recognized header for which the value is in some way invalid (such as
my example above)? I realize that "be liberal in what you accept" is
on my side, here, but it's not clear that the *letter* of the
specification is also on my side.
Dave Kristol
Received on Tuesday, 30 June 1998 11:42:16 UTC