[9653] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: HTTP/1.1 Host request-header query
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roy T. Fielding)
Sun Jan 21 02:01:30 1996
To: Stewart Brodie <S.N.Brodie@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Cc: www-talk@www10.w3.org
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 18 Jan 1996 18:34:08 GMT."
<8327.9601181834@dsse.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 1996 22:35:41 -0800
From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@avron.ics.uci.edu>
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
> 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)?
Yes.
> 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.
Yes.
> 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.
Netscape 2.0b* is broken in that regard.
> So should I be sending the ':port' or not?
Nope.
...Roy T. Fielding
Department of Information & Computer Science (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
University of California, Irvine, CA 92717-3425 fax:+1(714)824-4056
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/
