On May 3, 2006, at 5:19 PM, Mark Baker wrote:
On 5/2/06, Maciej Stachowiak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
BTW, I don't think "only appended to" solves it, since one of the
anticipated problems is that "Close" could be added and may break an
existing persistent connection.
If by "break" you mean "close cleanly", sure. But there's little harm
in that in general, since UAs already have to know to start new
connections if one fails (and another isn't available from the
pool). And I would think that being able to close connections could
be useful
in some cases.
I'm not sure network libraries will all react gracefully to a
"Connection: close" they did not add themselves.
Alternately, if folks feel strongly about this, we could prevent
"close" from being added to the Connection header.
That would end up with disallowing "close" and also any header field
that the XMLHttpRequest client may not set at all, or may only append
to (since we would not want to allow clients to force the proxy to
remove the UA-set value). That would be much more complicated than
the restrictions on any other header field, which are either "you
can't set it at all" or "you can only add to but not replace the UA
value". Is being able to set "Connection" a sufficiently compelling
use case to warrant this additional complexity? Note that we did not
choose to do this for other headers where some values might be valid
and interesting but others might be problematic. "Connection" does
not seem obviously more useful than "Accept-Encoding" for instance.
Regards,
Maciej
