Re: [google-gears-eng] Re: Deploying new expectation-extensions

Mark Nottingham wrote:
> 
>> the recipient of the entity MUST NOT ignore any Content-* (e.g. 
>> Content-Range) headers that it does not understand or implement and 
>> MUST return a 501 (Not Implemented) response in such cases.
> 
> (as 2616 does).
> 
> So, in theory you can PUT with Content-Range and know that if the server 
> doesn't support resumable requests, you'll get a 501. In practice, of 
> course, may be a completely different kettle of fish.

The reason this isn't a solution is that the server must swallow the body
of the request or lose keepalive and pipeline optimizations; 501 isn't an
intermediate response.

I wonder if a new 100-class code, the inverse of CONTINUE, wouldn't be of
value in HTTP/next to designate that a the request body can be omitted since
a final determination is available.  The client would still have to send a
body (since there is no ack) but using a chunked send, a chunk of 0 bytes
to finalize an empty request body would be sufficient.

Received on Wednesday, 17 September 2008 00:22:39 UTC