Re: RE-VERSION
Roy T. Fielding (fielding@kiwi.ics.uci.edu)
Wed, 03 Sep 1997 23:26:25 -0700
>issue: keep-alives in server
> By default, persistent connections are supposed to be used in 1.1.
> When a server receives a downgraded request from a proxy, which
> came from a 1.1 client, should it respond with a connection: close?
The downgraded request is HTTP/1.0 and will not include the keep-alive
connection directive, so the server will not establish a persistent
connection. Apache 1.2 always sends "Connection: close" on non-persistent
responses, even to normal HTTP/1.0 requests, but I don't think this
should be a requirement (just a good idea).
>Issue: (related) the draft says that connection and response version
> are hop-by-hop, but it also says that a proxy may act as a 'tunnel'
> at any time. These are contradictory, since proxies may downgrade
> a request, but tunnel the response, which breaks the hop-by-hop
> nature of response version.
No, they aren't contradictory, because a tunnel is not a proxy.
As soon as the proxy becomes a tunnel, its behavior is no more significant
to HTTP than any TCP/IP router on the net. In other words, the hop is gone.
Yes, "hop" is a confusing word here, but we ran out of good words for
active HTTP nodes.
The terms "tunnel", "client", "proxy", "server", etc., are all defined
within the specification.
....Roy