Re: Entities

Larry Masinter wrote:
>>"A message-body MUST NOT be included in a request if the specification
> 
> 
>>of the request method (section 5.1.1) does not allow sending an 
>>entity-body in requests."
> 
> 
> http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Issues/BeforeLastCall.html
> issue 119 "MESSAGE-BODY",
> and thread started with
> http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/1997q3/0393.html
> 
> 
> It looks like we didn't actually close this issue well enough,
> since it's still being raised. Certainly the archive record is that
> the intent was (for compatibility) to disallow bodies for
> GET, HEAD and DELETE, but possibly allow bodies on other
> methods unless explicitly disallowed (for extensibility's
> sake).
> 


Aha! This answers my question nicely, thank you.  I was unaware of the 
existance of the Last Call document.

The reason I brought this up was because I was running into a problem 
where a piece of client software was adding a "Content-Length: 0" header 
to all GET requests it sent.  All the webservers that I tried it on 
completed the requests without complaint but when a (transparent) squid 
proxy was added into the mix it stopped working (with a 411 response 
code, of all things).  I wasn't sure which end of the problem I should fix.

Thanks!

Received on Friday, 16 August 2002 09:59:45 UTC