Re: Confused by HTTP 1.0 vs HTTP 1.1

On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 06:51:23PM +0000, Matthew Stanfield wrote:

> I've developing some software that uses sockets to communicate with web
> servers using HTTP. I've seen both HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 used in GET
> headers. EG. "GET / HTTP/1.0" and "GET / HTTP/1.1". So far I've been using
> HTTP 1.0 in my GET headers but while browsing this list's archives I saw
> that HTTP 1.1 is in use (EG. the thread "HTTP 1.1, proxy servers, and
> failed connections") and wondered whether I should in fact be using 1.1
> instead.
> 
> Having run some tests it seems that some 'mainstream' web servers (EG.
> www.google.com) don't seem to respond to a HTTP 1.1 GETs. While others (EG.
> www.yahoo.com) do and act normally.

It sounds like you've been sending a minimal HTTP/1.0 request to these
servers, and tried simply changing the HTTP/1.0 to HTTP/1.1 in the initial
request line. HTTP 1.1 also requires requests to provide a Host header.
Read the RFC for details, but I think you'll find that most servers accept
properly-formatted HTTP 1.0 or HTTP 1.1 requests -- probably HTTP 0.9,
also, but let's not go there. ;-)

-- 
Peter Watkins - peterw@tux.org - peterw@usa.net - http://www.tux.org/~peterw/ 
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