NULL paths in requests

I've found a client that sends requests (when configured to use a proxy) 
like:

GET  HTTP/1.1
Host: some host

e.g. 2 spaces between GET and HTTP/1.1

Is this deemed a "NULL" path?  In httpbis-p1-messaging-06.txt it talks 
about

  A transparent proxy MUST NOT rewrite the "path-absolute" part of the
   received request-target when forwarding it to the next inbound
   server, except as noted above to replace a null path-absolute with
   "/".


However this doesn't make much sense, since what is a transparent 
proxy?  Is this one that intercepted the TCP connection?  Otherwise it 
should have received a request in the form absolute-URI, which isn't 
allowed to be rewritten as above.  Or is it?

In fact path-absolute isn't necessarily a part of the request-URI, it 
could be the whole request-URI.

Actually absolute-URI as per RFC 3986 seems to allow a lot more forms 
than it did in RFC2616.  Is this desired?  I'd presume not.

from RFC 3986

   absolute-URI  = scheme ":" hier-part [ "?" query ]

   hier-part     = "//" authority path-abempty
                 / path-absolute
                 / path-rootless
                 / path-empty


e.g. in the old form, the path-absolute, path-rootless, and path-empty 
forms were not allowed as part of absolute-URI.




-- 
Adrien de Croy - WinGate Proxy Server - http://www.wingate.com

Received on Saturday, 4 July 2009 03:20:41 UTC