RE: HEAD message

From: James A. Donald <jdonald@dont-contact.us>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 10:52:37 -0700

From: Dancer [mailto:dancer@zeor.simegen.com]
> Wanna see some breakage? squid/bin/client http://home.microsoft.com/
>
> Try to spot the difference between the object header and body :/

        HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Date: Fri,
                27 Aug 1999 17:19:32 GMT Location:
                http://www.msn.com/default.asp?HMC2MSN=0
        Content-Type:text/html
        <head><title>Object moved</title></head>
        <body><h1>Object Moved</h1>This object may be found <a
                HREF="http://www.msn.com/default.asp?HMC2MSN=0">here</
                a>.</body>D

This response, though illegal, will generally be passed correctly
because most proxies will mistake the body for a header, due to the
absence of carriage returns, and will assume there is no body, due to
the absence of any Content-length field.

On the other hand, if the proxy thinks there should be a body because
it is a 302, which should have a body, we will indeed see
some breakage, or if the Proxy attempts to parse every header, we
will also see some breakage.

This response will work most of the time with most proxies, because of
accidents of the way they happen to be implemented.

Doubtless the next RFC will tell us that mysterious unintelligible
arbitrary header like bits of data should be passed as is,
retrospectively making Microsoft's response legal.
Received on Fri Aug 27 1999 - 11:39:39 MDT

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