Re: [XHR] Comments on the latest public working draft

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Tue, 13 May 2008 09:25:42 +0200, Julian Reschke 
> <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:
>> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>> On Mon, 12 May 2008 17:26:07 +0200, Julian Reschke 
>>> <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:
>>>> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>>>>> - On the send algorithm, step 4 ("If stored method is GET act as 
>>>>>> if the data argument is null"), why only GET and not HEAD, also?
>>>>>  In order to subset HTTP as little as possible.
>>>>
>>>> Well, *if* you subset it, please make it in a consistent way. If the 
>>>> subsetting applies to GET, it should also apply to HEAD.
>>>  Would it stop with HEAD or would there be more methods to consider 
>>> going forward? If it's just HEAD I suppose we could add it, yes.
>>
>> It would stop with HEAD, because HEAD and GET by definition should do 
>> the same thing (except for HEAD not returning the response body).
> 
> Actually, it seems that implementations do pass it through for HEAD. It 
> is just GET where they don't and given that we can't allow it for 
> cross-site GET requests anyway I think forward consistency is desirable. 
> More background information is available in this thread:
> 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapi/2007Dec/thread.html#msg8

Yep, lots of discussion.

Anyway, an implementation that drops the body on GET but not on HEAD 
*very* clearly is buggy. The XHR spec should not mandate these kind of bugs.

BR, Julian

Received on Friday, 16 May 2008 09:18:12 UTC