[9651] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
HTTP/1.1 Host request-header query
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stewart Brodie)
Thu Jan 18 13:42:01 1996
From: Stewart Brodie <S.N.Brodie@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: www-talk@www10.w3.org
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 18:34:08 +0000 (GMT)
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
A couple of requests for clarification:
Section 10.22 of the HTTP/1.1 draft (draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-00.*) talks
about the Host request-header.
Am I correct in my interpretation that if the user agent is sending the
request directly to the origin server, then this header is required;
when sending it not to the origin server, it can be omitted (presumably
since the complete URL is given in the Request-URI)?
The document also specifies that Host: header "must not include the
trailing ':port' information which may also be found in the net_loc
portion of a URL". Surely the Request-URI sent to an origin server will
_not_ include the net_loc portion of the URL? I assume that the server
can work out the port number in the original URL by doing a getsockname
(or equivalent) on its end of the connection.
Experimentation with Netscape 2.0b3J shows that it is sending a :port on
the end of all its Host request-headers containing the complete net_loc
field of the http URL I entered, although I am well aware not to take
the behaviour of Netscape as the definitive way to do things.
So should I be sending the ':port' or not?
--
Stewart Brodie, Electronics & Computer Science, Southampton University.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~snb94r/ http://delenn.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
