Re: Proposal: 205 Bodies [#88]

On Jun 8, 2009, at 12:43 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:

> Roy T. Fielding wrote:
>> ...
>> Big objection.  205 was added late in the process of 2068 and
>> could not be grandfathered into the message parsing algorithm
>> as yet another (bad) exception.  The requirement that 205 not
>> include an entity means that the message-body MUST be of zero size
>> (i.e., Content-Length must be supplied with a value of 0
>> or Transfer-Encoding chunked is used with a zero-length chunk).
>> Hence, it is correct as specified, albeit confusing.  It will
>> be less confusing when the terminology is cleaned up.
>> ...
>
> Yes, I was wondering about that (and duplicated language about  
> special cases in Part 1 & 2).
>
> So, shouldn't we change part of the description for status 205 from
>
> 	"The response MUST NOT include an entity."
>
> to
>
> 	"The response MUST include a zero-length entity."
>
> ?

I think that would lead to more philosophical arguments than simply
removing the sentence (it is a stupid requirement).

....Roy