- From: Miles Sabin <msabin@cromwellmedia.co.uk>
- Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 13:25:13 +0100
- To: "'http-wg@hplb.hpl.hp.com'" <http-wg@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
I'd be grateful for some advice on how the slogan 'applications should be liberal in what they receive and conservative in what they send' should be applied to proxy servers. The particular case I have in mind is an origin server (which shall remain nameless) returning an entity body with a 304. The client-side of our proxy is liberal enough to cope with this on receipt, but the server- side conservatively refuses to forward it. In this scenario it seems pretty reasonable to discard the entity: there's no way of reporting an error back to the origin server, and it seems a bit extreme to send the client a 502. But trying to generalize to other kinds of upstream and downstream bad behaviour opens up a can of worms. The options seem to be, 1. Forward broken HTTP. 2. Enforce strict conformance by responding to all bad requests with 400s and all bad replies with 502s. 3. Fixup up bad requests/replies on their way through wherever possible. (1) is pretty much out of the question; (2) is over the top; and (3) is completely unspecified, so liable to be done differently be different proxy implementors. What to do? Cheers, Miles -- Miles Sabin Cromwell Media Internet Systems Architect 5/6 Glenthorne Mews +44 (0)181 410 2230 London, W6 0LJ msabin@cromwellmedia.co.uk England
Received on Friday, 10 September 1999 05:30:03 UTC