+---------- On Nov 10, Nathan Folkman said: > HTTP 1.1 is not currently supported, and so far there are no plans for adding > support for it to the 4.0 version. To be honest it's been a while since I've > looked at the 1.1 spec - what's it all about, and what benefits would there > be if we were to support it? Would we need to support all of it, or are there > particular parts, such as the pipelining you mention, which would be more > beneficial then others?
It's probably not too hard to get AOLserver to be HTTP/1.1-compliant. I don't think there are too many additional requirements in HTTP/1.1 over HTTP/1.0. Mostly there are a bunch of new optional features. HTTP/1.1 supports byte ranges. AOLserver 3.3.1+ad13 has support for returning a byte range via fastpath and ns_returnfile. This can be very helpful for returning large static files to users with unreliable connections. I think Acrobat may also take advantage of this. HTTP/1.1 has persistent connections enabled by default. HTTP/1.1 supports chunked transfer encoding. This means that the server doesn't need to know the entire entity size in advance (and set the Content-Length response header appropriately) to enable a persistent connection. This is useful when a dynamic page takes a long time to generate.
