Re: CRLF vs LF was: Re: holding connections open...

Karl Auerbach (karl@cavebear.com)
Mon, 19 Sep 1994 05:49:23 +0200

>>Am I imagining things are do we have some inconsistency about how
>>servers terminate their header lines? Out of the side of my eye last
>>week I think I perceived two major servers (NCSA and CERN) having
>>different opinions whether to terminate a header line with a simple LF
>>or a CRLF pair.
>
>Both are permitted under RFC822 rules. Basically you can't guarantee
>that a telnet port will send CRLF or that it will only send LF so both have
>to be OK.

There seem to have differing opinions on this topic.

It is certainly easy enough to deal with CRLF or simply LF at the
end of most header lines.

Where the ambiguity hits is on the blank line that separates
the header from the binary text.

I would hope that we wouldn't have a situation where the header
ends with something like the following:

Date: xxxxxCRLF
LF
binary stuff...

or
Date: xxxxxLF
CRLF
binary stuff...

Again, people can live with this, but it is another rock on the
roadway that implementors can trip over.

--karl--