Re: useragent

On Thu, 10 Jul 1997, Duane Wessels wrote:

> nullc@nightshade.ml.org writes:
>
> >To see my problem, cause a load of www.yahoo.com from a machine running
> >lynx then view it from a computer running netscape.. Yahoo changes the
> >page based on useragent.. :(
>
> Then they should set
>
> Expires: 0
>
> or something equivalent in their reply headers, at least for HTTP/1.0
> requests.
>
> Duane W.

They should do a lot more than this. They do not follow the HTTP/1.0 spec
in lots of different ways. I talked to the guy there who does the
programming (John Hanley) and he didn't seem too interested in fixing
their servers anytime soon.

They interpret all HEAD requests as GET requests, and tend to send LF
instead of CRLF.

About a month ago they stopped sending immediate expiration dates, in an
attempt to become more proxy-friendly. However, this broke a bunch of our
servers because they now try to send IMS requests to Yahoo.
Unfortunately, Yahoo replies to an IMS request with a single line followed
by a single LF:

HTTP/1.0 304 NM

The HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 specs say that responses should be followed by
CRLF and then a second CRLF after the (empty) message body.

What we are seeing with our servers is that they sit and wait for more
data even though the connection has been closed. Eventually they time out
and return an error.

I haven't checked yet to see whether or not this happens with the newest
version of Squid.

Kevin

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 Kevin Fink <kevin@fink.com> N2H2
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Received on Fri Jul 11 1997 - 14:16:38 MDT