Unidentified subject!

Scott Lawrence  wrote:
Original Article: http://www.egroups.com/list/http-wg/?start=8491
> kugler@us.ibm.com wrote:
>
> > The IPP WG would really like clarification on this point:  Is the
intent of
> > the HTTP/1.1 spec to say that an HTTP/1.1 server MAY reject any request
> > without a defined Content-Length?  This would imply that a conformant
> > HTTP/1.1 server MAY reject any request with the "chunked"
transfer-coding.
>
> I don't know who can provide any sort of authoritative response - don't
> take mine as being 'from the HTTP WG'; I'm just another HTTP server
> vendor.

Thanks for your reply.  I realize there's probably no authoritative answer
available, but as an HTTP server vendor you probably know more about this
than I do as an printer vendor, so I appreciate your help.

>
> First, I think that the note Harry Lewis sent titled "IPP> Chunking
> Explanation" [1] sums it up pretty well.  An HTTP server certainly has
the
> option of using the "Length Required" code for whatever reason it wants
> to.
If this is the correct interpretation, then I was misled for a long time by
the paragraph in section 4.4, "Message Length", that says "All HTTP/1.1
applications that receive entities MUST accept the “chunked”
transfer-coding (section 3.6), thus allowing this mechanism to be used for
messages when the message length cannot be determined in advance. "  I
think it would be very helpful to have a note or warning added to that
paragraph;  perhaps:

All HTTP/1.1 applications that receive entities MUST accept the “chunked”
transfer-coding (section 3.6), thus allowing this mechanism to be used for
messages when the message length cannot be determined in advance.  Note:
this does NOT mean that servers must accept HTTP/1.1 requests containing a
message-body with the “chunked” transfer-coding.

> My own judgement would be that a printer design that did not allow for
> very large inputs of indeterminate length would be a poor one, and as a
> result I would not choose an HTTP layer implementation that restricted me
> to CGI.
>
Agreed.

> [1] <872566FF.0013A85F.00@d53mta05h.boulder.ibm.com>
>     (Can't seem to find a web-accessible ipp list archive...)

You can find web-accessible ipp list archives at

http://www.pwg.org/hypermail/ipp/

and

http://www.egroups.com/list/ipp/info.html

(BTW, none of my messages to http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com seem to make it to
the archives at

http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/

or

http://www.findmail.com/listsaver/http-wg/

Does one have to be subscribed in order to post messages?  I thought there
was some kind of IETF rule against that.)


Carl Kugler
IBM Printing Systems Co.