Re: proposed change for Issue 103 (content-*)

Brian Smith wrote:
> Julian Reschke wrote:
>> OLD:
>>
>>     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.
>>
>> NEW:
>>
>>     NOT ignore any Content-* headers (headers starting with the prefix
>>     'Content-') that it does not understand or implement and MUST
>>     return a 501 (Not Implemented) response in such cases.
> 
> Given that this requirement is almost universally ignored, is practically
> useless, is ill-defined, and is inconsistent between PUT and other PUT-like
> methods, the whole statement should just be removed.

Potentially, yes. We've got a separate ticket for that one: 
<http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/104>, where Roy wrote:

> If we change the spec to say that all unrecognized header fields should simply be ignored (forwarded downstream but never saved), then a lot of these strange handling requirements can be removed. My guess is that "must ignore" behavior is more consistent with current implementations than what is specified in 2616. 

But I do not believe we have consensus on that one yet, so fixing issue 
103 still seems to be useful.

> ...

BR, Julian

Received on Tuesday, 4 November 2008 17:17:29 UTC