Subject: [MMUSIC] What is "current"?

From: Tom Marshall <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 17:49:59 -0700

Here's an interesting issue.  RFC2326 says this:

   Since many of the definitions and syntax are identical to HTTP/1.1,  
   this specification only points to the section where they are defined
   rather than copying it. For brevity, [HX.Y] is to be taken to refer
   to Section X.Y of the current HTTP/1.1 specification (RFC 2068 [2]).

"current" can be taken two ways: current as of the writing, or current as of
the reading.

Further, it seems the meaning of an empty "Accept-Encoding:" header has been
reversed between 2068 and 2616.  The former says explicitly that it means
none are acceptable and the latter says that the "identity" encoding is
always acceptable unless explicitly refused.

It seems that there is a bug in the HTTP spec and this makes it a bug in the
RTSP spec.

What is a well-behaved server to do in this case???

-- 
A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a
new canvas to an artist.
        -- Norman Augustine

---

From: Aaron Colwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 20:36:26 -0700 (PDT)

Looks like you are our server guy looking into this bug. :)

Here is my interpretation of the HTTP spec. In RFC 2068 it says "An empty
Accept-Encoding value indicates none are acceptable". I interpret that to
mean that none of the encoding types (ie. compress or gzip) are
acceptable. Since not specifying the Accept-Encoding field means that the
server can choose any encoding it wants, sending the header with an empty
value seems to me to be the only way to tell the server you don't want it
to use any encoding.

I think that RFC 2616 tries to clarify this condition, but makes things a
little confusing by introducing the "identity" encoding. RFC 2616 says "If
the Accept-Encoding field-value is empty, then only the "identity"
encoding is acceptable." If you use my interpretation of RFC 2068, then
the 2 RFCs are consistent. If my interpretation is wrong then I agree with
you that they are inconsistent.

Aaron

> What is a well-behaved server to do in this case???
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