Re:HEAD and NOT_MODIFIED

At 10:36 PM on 23/6/96, Anselm Baird-Smith wrote:

> Alexandre Rafalovitch writes:
>  > Hi,
>  >
>  > This is a small question on HTTP protocol that I think Jigsaw is not
>  > implementing correctly.
>  >
>  > In RFC 1945, HTTP/1.0 it states for HEAD request:
>  > " There is no 'conditional HEAD' request analogous to the conditional GET.
>  > If an If-Modified-Since header field is included with a HEAD request, it
>  > should be ignored".
>  >
>  > The default implementation does not take that into consideration, so a HEAD
>  > request might well end up with NOT_MODIFIED as a responce.
>  > Is that important and deserves fixing and clear statement for everybody
>  > overriding HEAD or it would never break anything and is not worth thinking
>  > about it?
>
>
> Wow you are right ! I was too lazy to put a makeHeaders() method in
> the FileResource, but I am going to do it ASAP (so that both get and
> head compute fill in the initial reply through this new makeHeaders -
> or whatever).
>
> Thanks,
> Anselm.

Glad to be helpfull, but you should probably also modify default
implementation so that it unsets If-Modified-Since. That would work fine
then even in the cases where people do not want to care about overriding
head().

Still digging,
Alex.

alex@access.com.au

Received on Sunday, 23 June 1996 22:47:44 UTC