- From: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
- Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2013 19:11:57 +1000
- To: Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>
- Cc: "ietf-http-wg@w3.org Group" <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
On 20/04/2013, at 7:06 PM, Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu> wrote: > On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 06:41:01PM +1000, Mark Nottingham wrote: >> p2 4.3.2 says: >> >> Aside from the payload header fields (Section 3.3), the server SHOULD >> send the same header fields in response to a HEAD request as it would >> have sent if the request had been a GET. >> >> The payload header fields include Content-Length, which in my testing is >> pretty common in HEAD responses. Was this an oversight, or intentional? > > In my opinion it was intentional, as it's the only way for a client > to know the payload size in advance without retrieving the file. I was asking if it was intentional that, as currently specified, we say that C-L should be *omitted* from HEAD responses. > Also I remember about at least one cache which used to truncate cached > contents when a server returned "content-length: 0" in response to a > HEAD request. So most likely, especially due to caches, we don't want > the server to return a different content-length on HEAD as much as > possible. Yes, I see that quite a bit. >> (We already have an exception for HEAD responses in p1's message body length >> algorithm, section 3.3.3). > > Exactly, so the SHOULD above should not cause any issue. At best it's a sloppy SHOULD, but I think it's actively misleading, at the moment... it's saying you SHOULD send the headers back, EXCEPT for a set which includes C-L. -- Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/
Received on Saturday, 20 April 2013 09:12:23 UTC