Subject: Re: Requests that do now allow bodies (do they exist?), was: Proposal: 205 Bodies [#88]

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:52:12 +0200

Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> ...
>> So to reduce confusion, it would be good to drop the sentence above, 
>> and make that paragraph just say:
>>
>> "The presence of a message-body in a request is signaled by the 
>> inclusion of a Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding header field in the 
>> request's message-headers. When a request message contains both a 
>> message-body of non-zero length and a method that does not define any 
>> semantics for that request message-body, then an origin server SHOULD 
>> either ignore the message-body or respond with an appropriate error 
>> message (e.g., 413). A proxy or gateway, when presented the same 
>> request, SHOULD either forward the request inbound with the 
>> message-body or ignore the message-body when determining a response."
> 
> I am not sure about the last sentence, but the rest is okay.  The
> real interoperability requirement is that the proxy/gateway must parse
> the message correctly (handling the body even if it is not expected
> by the method semantics) and not treat that body as a second request.
> Whether it forwards the request or responds with an error is a decision
> left to the local policies, I think.
> 
> ....Roy
> ...

I have removed that sentence with 
<http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/changeset/600>.

There's more work to do to fully resolve this issue though.

BR, Julian