Re: HTTP/1.0 based daemon. Should 0.9 be supported
Rick Troth (troth@rice.edu)
Wed, 10 Aug 1994 17:33:49 +0200
> Well I guess the subject says it all.
Yup. My answer is "absolutely!".
> I have a daemon working fine appart from the fact that it occasionally
> receives some HTTP 0.9 requests.
>
> E.G. GET /?examples^M\n
Occasionally? I'm a little surprised that you don't
get them more frequently. I responded to a note a couple of days ago
about two clients (one of which I wrote) that had trouble with some
NT based server that rejected "simple GET" requests. I was really
quite surprised. Paul, yours isn't the same NT server, is it?
> Now since the daemon relies on HTTP/1.0 status codes (I assume... did
> 0.9 support 302 for example), should I:
>
> a) try and provide basic support for HTTP 0.9 or
(echoing my earlier admonition) Absolutely.
All you really need to do is look for the "HTTP/1.0"
and set a flag. If that flag remains unset, then respond
without headers; if it's set, then respond with headers.
You should always generate some "this document has moved"
or "this document is actually here" HTML. Send that, and the
0.9 clients will be at least usable with your server. Such HTML
may be discarded by a 1.0 client. Otherwise ...
> b) have the daemon send an error message to the effect that the client
> is using an old version of HTTP which isnt supported.
No way. 0.9 may be "old HTTP", but the "simple GET"
is still in the protocol (or I read the wrong 1.0 spec somewhere
AND that author is asking for trouble, headaches, and flames).
One of the two clients I mentioned above is my own, which intentionally
does a "simple GET" for reasons other than just my own laziness.
> Luckily either way wont take too long (since the URL parsing is done
> using yacc - dont ask, I was told to do it that way), but Im wondering
> which is the more correct response according to this group.
I honestly feel better about this somewhat demanding
recommendation since you say it won't take long to implement.
(programmer time is the most expensive part)
I'm finding other suggestions for well behaved servers in
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html
Tim signed it, but didn't date it. How old is this 0.9 doc?
It's got a lot of still relevant stuff in it.
> Cheers,
>
> Paul
> .--------Paul Wain ( X.500 Project Engineer and WWW Person at Brunel)---------.
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--
Rick Troth <troth@rice.edu>, Rice University, Information Systems