Re: Is forwarding hop-by-hop headers a MUST-level violation?

• From: Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>
• Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2004 13:22:38 +0100
• To: Alex Rousskov <rousskov@measurement-factory.com>
• Cc: ietf-http-wg@w3.org
• Message-ID: <20040710122238.GA5149@mail.shareable.org>

Alex Rousskov wrote:
>       - Keep-Alive
> 	RFC 2068 does not seem to have an explicit MUST for it

However RFC 2068 does imply that Keep-Alive should appear in the
Connection header -- at least when the client knows its talking to a
proxy.

   The problem was that some existing 1.0 clients may be sending
   Keep-Alive to a proxy server that doesn't understand Connection,
   which would then erroneously forward it to the next inbound server,

>    Hop-by-hop headers are meaningful only for a single
>    transport-level connection. Hop-by-hop headers are:
> 
...
>           - Transfer-Encoding
...
> 
>    All hop-by-hop headers (other than Connection) MUST be listed in
>    the Connection header.

I haven't noticed Transfer-Encoding being listed in the Connection
header to date.  All proxies need to understand Transfer-Encoding to
determine the message boundary, so I see no need for it to appear in
Connection.  Can't the above text safely say "(other than Connection
and Transfer-Encoding)"?

-- Jamie

Received on Saturday, 10 July 2004 08:22:52 UTC