Re: Benjamin Kaduk's Discuss on draft-ietf-httpbis-messaging-16: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

Am 02.07.2021 um 10:09 schrieb Mark Nottingham:
> ... > The decisions about absolute-form requests were made *way* back when.
My reading of the archive (circa September and October 1995 -- I'm sure
those that were there will correct me) is that Host headers were added
to address the multiple-hosts-on-an-IP problem in a way that was
backwards-compatible with HTTP/1.0, but because some folks wanted to
enable the use of URNs, proxies were required to support and use the
absolute form, so that URNs could be (theoretically) resolvable through
them. That didn't happen, but it is possible to use e.g., FTP through a
HTTP proxy as a result (last I looked).
>
> I think the solution here is to restrict the statement above so that it only applies to proxies, and to add a requirement for origin servers (including gateways) to specifically check absolute-form URIs for alignment regarding the scheme.
>
> Does that make sense to everyone (especially Roy, who has the most history here)?
> ...

Not really.

My understanding is that support for "absolute-form" in request lines
has been a "MUST" level requirement for ages.

Do you want to change that? If not, we'll still have to define how to
compute the target URI from the request line, so special-casing the
support for proxies breaks that.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Wednesday, 7 July 2021 09:05:54 UTC