To the HTTP WG from the IPP WG:
I've tried to post this twice before, but it never makes it into the
archives at
http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/
or
http://www.findmail.com/listsaver/http-wg/
The IPP WG would really like clarification on this point: Is the intent of
the HTTP/1.1 spec to say that an HTTP/1.1 server MAY reject any request
without a defined Content-Length? This would imply that a conformant
HTTP/1.1 server MAY reject any request with the "chunked" transfer-coding.
-Carl Kugler
---------------------- Forwarded by Carl Kugler/Boulder/IBM on 01/12/99
04:33 PM ---------------------------
Carl Kugler
01/07/99 08:27 AM
To: CGI-WG at Golux.Com
cc: ipp at pwg.org, http-wg at cuckoo.hpl.hp.com, SERVLET-INTEREST at JAVA.SUN.COM
From: Carl Kugler/Boulder/IBM at IBMUS
Subject: Re: IPP> Chunked POST: SUMMARY (Document link not converted)
Ross Patterson wrote:
>>> All HTTP/1.1 applications that receive entities MUST accept the
>>> "chunked" transfer-coding (section 3.6), thus allowing this mechanism
>>> to be used for messages when the message length cannot be determined
>>> in advance.
>>>>Apparently that should be interpreted as "MUST accept the 'chunked'
>>TRANSFER-CODING, but NEED NOT accept REQUESTs with that transfer-coding."
>Correct - all HTTP 1.1 servers must be able to process requests encoded
>as chunked data, but they are still allowed to refuse the request for
>other reasons.
To me, the presence of the 411 status code means that an HTTP/1.1 server
MAY refuse to accept a request for the specific reason that entity body is
encoded with the "chunked" transfer-coding:
411 Length Required
The server refuses to accept the request without a defined Content-Length.
The client MAY repeat the request if it adds a valid Content-Length header
field containing the length of the message-body in the request message.
-Carl