Subject: IPP> "breaks all known proxies"

From: Larry Masinter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 15:42:42 PDT

The claims that a new scheme 'breaks all known proxies'
seems to be disingenous. The squid server 
(http://squid.nlanr.net/Squid/1.1/Release-Notes-1.1.txt)
contains a URL redirector capability that would easily
allow a squid proxy to be reconfigured to redirect 
"ipp" requests to "http" requests, for example, using
a simple rewrite rule. On the other hand, squid doesn't seem
to have any way to rewrite methods.

The W3C httpd server, implemented as a proxy, similarly
has a configuration file which will allow it to map new
URL schemes (http://www.w3.org/Daemon/User/Config/Rules.html).
While there is also support for enabling other methods
(http://www.w3.org/Daemon/User/Config/General.html#Enable),
it says

 By default GET, HEAD and POST are enabled, and the rest are
disabled. 

so a PRINT method would be disabled through all those proxy
servers if installed with the default (as most are).

The commercial products listed in 
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Forum/Reports/
as proxies supporting HTTP/1.1 don't have their configuration
documentation online for me to determine whether they work
with PRINT; it would seem from looking at the CL-HTTP
documentation that it doesn't, for example, in proxy mode.

I'm investigating http://lpwa.com:8000 to see if it will
pass a PRINT method vs. a POST method.

Larry