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

On 17/09/2008, at 10:21 AM, William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:

> 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.
>


Sounds nice, but I don't know that the introduced complexity is worth  
keeping connections open in a fail case; implementers already seem to  
have enough trouble with continue...

Cheers,


--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Wednesday, 17 September 2008 00:44:17 UTC