chunking and HTTP/1.0

[Dean Gaudet <dg...@arctic.org>]

Yeah you read it right ... what if a client sent "Accept-Encoding:
chunked" with an HTTP/1.0 request.  Right now we ignore it.  Should we
accept it and give them a nicely chunked response?

Why?  Well ... it's hard to write a HTTP/1.1 proxy, but some of the 1.1
features are easy to add incrementally.  This is an easy increment. 

Roy is probably puking right now :)  He's probably going to say something
like "but this would remove one of the incentives of upgrading proxies to
1.1".  Or maybe I'm just putting words in his mouth. 

Dean

Re: chunking and HTTP/1.0

[Paul Sutton <pa...@ukweb.com>]

On Tue, 19 Aug 1997, Dean Gaudet wrote:
> Yeah you read it right ... what if a client sent "Accept-Encoding:
> chunked" with an HTTP/1.0 request.  Right now we ignore it.  Should we
> accept it and give them a nicely chunked response?

Umm, sounds ok, but RFC2145 gives an example which just happens to be
about content-encoding:

   An implementation of HTTP/x.b sending a message to a recipient whose
   version is known to be HTTP/x.a, a < b, MUST NOT depend on the
   recipient understanding a header not defined in the specification for
   HTTP/x.a.  For example, HTTP/1.0 clients cannot be expected to
   understand chunked encodings, and so an HTTP/1.1 server must never
   send "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" in response to an HTTP/1.0 request
                (http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc2145.txt section 2.2)

I guess it depends on whether "cannot be expected" here can be overriden
by the client explicitly sending a "Accept-Encoding: chunked". 

//pcs