Subject: 204/205 Text nit

From: Nathan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 22:04:13 +0100

From p2-semantics, v21:

    The 204 response MUST NOT include a message body, and thus is always
    terminated by the first empty line after the header fields.

...

7.3.6.  205 Reset Content

    The message body included with the response MUST be empty.  Note that
    receivers still need to parse the response according to the algorithm
    defined in Section 3.3 of [Part1].

Are both bits of text trying to say the same thing, should they use the 
same text?

Best,

Nathan

---

From: Zhong Yu <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:43:48 -0500

My understanding:

A 204 response does not carry a representation.

A 205 response does carry a representation; the representation data
must be empty.

A 204 response may or may not contain Transfer-Encoding/Content-Length
headers; they will be ignored by client anyway, so it's better not to
include them (not even a Content-Length:0 header)

A 205 response must not contain a Transfer-Encoding (otherwise the
message body cannot be empty). The 205 response must
1. either contain a "Content-Length:0" header
2. or be terminated by closing the connection

(Note that 205 responses can still transmit non-trivial
representations, through crafted Content-Type and Content-Encoding.
That's probably not intended.)

Zhong Yu

On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 4:04 PM, Nathan <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Are both bits of text trying to say the same thing, should they use the same
> text?
>
> Best,
>
> Nathan
>

---

From: Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:50:53 +1100

They're purposefully different; 204 (along with 304 an 1xx) are grandfathered in as special cases from RFC2616 and predecessors. 

Cheers,

On 22/10/2012, at 8:04 AM, Nathan <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Are both bits of text trying to say the same thing, should they use the same text?
> 
> Best,
> 
> Nathan
> 

--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/