Re: HTTP/1.1 and colons and things

[Randy Terbush <ra...@zyzzyva.com>]

This issue could be an argument for putting nagware in our betas.

I vote that this gets fixed before the 1.1 release.


> On Tue, 18 Jun 1996, Robert S. Thau wrote:
> 
> > Alexei --- this is a messy situation, but the saving grace is that
> > right now, almost nobody is sending quality values at all, so their
> > syntax, in practical terms, doesn't matter much.
> 
> Right. The problem is, that it will just get worse in time. I mean, I'm
> not worried about servers having to read both ; and : - we can do that.
> I'm worried about existing servers that only understand ; (i.e. Apache)
> getting requests that contain : and Bad Things happening (which they will,
> unfortunately, as I explained in my last message).
> 
> > That said, the question of how to deal with this stuff is a messy
> > one.  I overhead some of the W3C folk trying to figure out what all
> > to have Jigsaw to do with this, and the best they came up with was
> > to accept the ':' if present, and treat ';q=blah' as if it had been
> > ':q=blah' in an HTTP/1.0 request for back compatbility.  In any case,
> > if we have to do anything about this at all for our own 1.1 release,
> > I think that since we're only claiming to do HTTP/1.0 anyway, treating
> > ':' and ';' equivalently is *probably* enough of a stopgap.
> 
> Well, certainly we can do that. But then, there are, according to
> Netcraft, over 60,000 servers out there running Apache 1.0.x... We can't
> fix those.
> 
> > Unless (once again), I'm missing something...
> 
> Well, I sincerely hope *I'm* missing something.
> 
> -- Alexei Kosut <ak...@organic.com>            The Apache HTTP Server 
>    http://www.nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us/~akosut/      http://www.apache.org/