Request methods that allow an entity-body

• From: Scott Nichol <snicholnews@scottnichol.com>
• Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:34:34 -0500
• To: <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <00e001c832d8$13a9a9b0$6801a8c0@GT5056>

Section 4.3 states

<quote>
The presence of a message-body in a request is signaled by the inclusion 
of a Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding header field in the request's 
message-headers. 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.
</quote>

I do not see any place in the specification where it says that any 
request does not allow sending an entity-body.  I might guess that GET 
and HEAD do not allow an entity-body, but isn't the spec supposed to 
remove guesswork?  The spec would be better if, for each request method, 
it were stated whether or not an entity-body is allowed.

Scott Nichol 

Received on Thursday, 29 November 2007 22:36:01 UTC