Requests that do now allow bodies (do they exist?), was: Proposal: 205 Bodies [#88]

Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> ...
>> From RFC2616 I see two potential candidates: (1) TRACE (which uses the 
>> same terminology as the 205 status that started this thread: "MUST NOT 
>> include an entity"), and (2) CONNECT (?).
> 
> There are no candidates.  Any change to the message parsing algorithm
> would require a major bump in HTTP version.
> ...

I should have phrased that differently.

Right now there's a unfortunate combination of Part 1 saying:

"...A message-body MUST NOT be included in a request if the 
specification of the request method (Section 2 of [Part2]) explicitly 
disallows an entity-body in requests..." -- 
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging-06.html#rfc.section.4.3.p.5>

and non-optimal text in Part 2.

So to reduce confusion, it would be good to drop the sentence above, and 
make that paragraph just say:

"The presence of a message-body in a request is signaled by the 
inclusion of a Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding header field in the 
request's message-headers. When a request message contains both a 
message-body of non-zero length and a method that does not define any 
semantics for that request message-body, then an origin server SHOULD 
either ignore the message-body or respond with an appropriate error 
message (e.g., 413). A proxy or gateway, when presented the same 
request, SHOULD either forward the request inbound with the message-body 
or ignore the message-body when determining a response."

BR, Julian

Received on Thursday, 11 June 2009 11:01:47 UTC