Re: Whitespace before responses

On 04/07/2011, at 6:56 AM, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:

> * Mark Nottingham wrote:
>> <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging-14#section-3.1> says:
>> 
>>  In the interest of robustness, servers SHOULD ignore at least one
>>  empty line received where a Request-Line is expected.  In other
>>  words, if the server is reading the protocol stream at the beginning
>>  of a message and receives a CRLF first, it SHOULD ignore the CRLF.
>> 
>> Should a similar approach be taken when clients parse responses?
>> 
>> See also:
>> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668168
> 
> Well, we absolutely need to come to an agreement where messages start
> and where they end. I would rather ask which behavior we are more like-
> ly to agree on. Apart from that it's obviously best if nothing has to
> be skipped, as skipping requires more work than not skipping.

From a quick test, Firefox and Chrome will skip at least two blank lines (without any whitespace on them); Opera will offer to download it as a file (!). Safari and Curl consider the whitespace and headers as the body (i.e., displaying it), as per HTTP/0.9. I don't have access to IE at the moment, but AIUI it'll operate as FF and Chrome.

Interestingly, Safari sniffs the response; if it looks like HTML, it will display it as such. I guess HTTP/0.9 by definition requires sniffing.

Cheers,

--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Tuesday, 5 July 2011 23:57:35 UTC