- From: Brian Smith <brian@briansmith.org>
- Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 14:14:26 -0500
- To: "'Mark Nottingham'" <mnot@mnot.net>, "'HTTP Working Group'" <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
- Cc: "'Adam Barth'" <w3c@adambarth.com>
Mark Nottingham wrote: > However, in previous discussions, Adam et al indicated that it would > be interesting to require that Referer always be sent, by minting a > new value (e.g., 'null', although it will have to be something else, > since "null" is a valid partial-URI) to indicate when a Referer is not > available. > Purely within HTTPbis, I think the best we could do, then, would be to > add a null value that can be sent when appropriate, and encourage UAs > to send referer. However, there's nothing stopping a third party > document (e.g., a W3C browser profile) from requiring that it be sent... There's no way to represent the null value in a way compatible with RFC 2616 syntax. New syntax for existing headers should be done only for HTTP 1.2 or later. Further, this would be a new feature, which would make it out of scope for HTTPbis. I think that the less that is said about Referer in the HTTPbis specification, the better. Its syntax and intended purpose is enough. Any requirements regarding Referer for UAs are pointless; they will be ignored by most UAs, especially UAs that aren't browsers. A specification for what web browsers should do with the Referer should go into a browser-specific specification. Regards, Brian
Received on Monday, 1 June 2009 19:15:06 UTC