- From: Jeffrey Mogul <mogul@pa.dec.com>
- Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 18:23:46 -0700
- To: Joris Dobbelsteen <joris.dobbelsteen@mail.com>
- Cc: "WWW WG (E-mail)" <http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com>
"Joris Dobbelsteen" <joris.dobbelsteen@mail.com> writes,
re: the Proxy-connection header:
RFC2616 also explains this header. It is actually the same as the
connection header, but specially for proxies. However I don't know
why they needed Proxy-Connection, maybe because some proxies did
not know/understand this header and have the orgin server not to
respond to it.
This header is NOT discussed in RFC2616!
According to the last discussion about this header in the HTTP-WG
archive
http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/1999/0030.html
this is only a Netscape-specific header.
Remember that an HTTP/1.1 system MUST NOT accept "Connection"
headers from HTTP/1.0 systems, because of the likelihood that
this was simply forwarded by a proxy that doesn't know what it
means. So HTTP/1.0 clients can't use "Connection", period.
Some HTTP/1.0 clients used the "Keep-Alive" header to do
one-hop persistent connections, but for reasons explained in
section 19.6.2 of RFC2616, this can't be safely sent to
proxies. So Netscape (as far as I recall) introduced
"Proxy-Connection" as a special-case workaround. It is not
part of HTTP/1.1.
-Jeff
Received on Monday, 11 September 2000 18:48:15 UTC