RE: Entities

• From: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
• Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 21:43:55 -0700
• To: "'Roy T. Fielding'" <fielding@apache.org>, "'Jeffrey Mogul'" <Jeff.Mogul@hp.com>
• Cc: "'Alex Rousskov'" <rousskov@measurement-factory.com>, "'Kim Horne'" <kim@pookzilla.com>, <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <000001c24804$35a65f00$6ace8642@masinter>

Roy, you're mixing server and client responsibilities. It's
quite possible to mandate "must not send a body with GET" for
clients and also mandate "must parse and ignore message bodies
with GET" for servers.

Jeff:

> > My vote: treat this as an erratum; ban bodies for GET, HEAD, and
> > DELETE.

I think this was mandated for legacy reasons.

Roy:

> Whether or not GET allows a message body is irrelevant.  HTTP allows a
> message body on any request.  The fact that clients should not send
> useless bodies does not lessen the requirement of servers to parse a
> message independent of the message semantics.  The only exception is
> HEAD responses, and that only because of legacy issues.

While this is mandated for future extensibility.

I don't think the two are incompatible.

Received on Tuesday, 20 August 2002 00:43:43 UTC