RE: Proxy-connection

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeffrey Mogul [mailto:mogul@pa.dec.com]
> Sent: dinsdag 12 september 2000 3:24
> To: Joris Dobbelsteen
> Cc: WWW WG (E-mail)
> Subject: Re: Proxy-connection 
> 
> 
> "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!

Reviewed it, and you are right... I did mix it up with the existance
of the proxy-authentication and proxy-authorization headers.
Also when developing for my own a proxy server, MSIE did also send the
proxy-connection header.

> 
> 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.

Said it all.....
So Proxy-Connection can be retired in HTTP/1.1 and be replaced with
the connection header.
> 
> -Jeff
> 
> 

Won't it be good for proxies if getting HTTP/1.0. For HTTP/1.1 look for
a connection header, and either discard the proxy-connection header, or
use it if the connection header is not present?

- Joris

Received on Tuesday, 12 September 2000 07:40:17 UTC