Is HTTP/1.1 required for WebDAV?

I thought it was pretty clear in rfc2518 (and rfc2518 bis) that WebDAV 
servers and clients are HTTP/1.1 servers and clients because the 
introduction section of the rfc starts off, "This document describes an 
extension to the HTTP/1.1 protocol that allows clients to perform 
remote web content authoring operations."

However, during interoperability testing I've found several servers 
which return HTTP/1.0 in the Status-Line of their response message and 
behave as HTTP/1.0 servers (i.e., they do not handle HTTP/1.1 
persistent connections correctly, there are no Content-Length headers 
in a response with a message-body, etc.). For the most part, the Mac OS 
X WebDAV file system client works with these servers but it works much 
slower because of transaction aborts and retries.

Should WebDAV clients refuse to use HTTP/1.0 servers and should WebDAV 
servers refuse to work with HTTP/1.0 clients?

If yes, should rfc2518 bis make HTTP/1.1 (or later) a MUST?

Jim Luther
Mac OS X File Systems group
Apple Computer, Inc.

Received on Friday, 31 January 2003 12:29:00 UTC