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Re: clarify some MUST requirements in HTTPbis part 1 section 3.3

From: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2011 21:50:42 +0100
Message-ID: <4ED93A22.8090402@gmx.de>
To: Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>
CC: Alex Rousskov <rousskov@measurement-factory.com>, Adrien de Croy <adrien@qbik.com>, Patrick McManus <mcmanus@ducksong.com>, ietf-http-wg@w3.org
On 2011-12-02 21:39, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 10:21:42AM -0700, Alex Rousskov wrote:
>> If we state that, an HTTP proxy would have to make a choice when dealing
>> with a "broken" incoming message:
>>
>>    1) reject the malformed message
>>    2) forward a "fixed" message
>>    3) forward raw bytes, becoming a TCP tunnel
>>
>> Currently, many interpret HTTP specs as if there is another option:
>>
>>    4) forward the malformed message "as is"
>>       while interpreting it correctly internally.
>
> Actually, it's even more common to see this :
>
>      5) ignore 90% of headers you don't care about and for which you
>         don't know how to determine the validity, and apply 4) when
>         you care about the header.
>
> I don't see how we can impose 2) for the 90% headers that a proxy
> does not understand and just ignores.
> ...

The reason being that some header fields are special and essential for 
message framing/routing.

If HTTP/1.1 had been defined from scratch, Host and Content-Length 
probably wouldn't be in the same part of the message as other metadata...
Received on Friday, 2 December 2011 20:51:18 UTC

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