"James A. Donald" wrote:
> > How common are head requests?
From: Dancer [mailto:dancer@zeor.simegen.com]
> Good question James. To find out, we visited a real website, and
> looked in the logs.
It appears to me that HEAD requests are generated by proxies, not
browsers. Since my proxy will be very close to the browser, it should
be acceptable to mistreat HEAD requests, while it would be
unacceptable for a server to mistreat HEAD requests.
A server has no problem in correctly treating a HEAD request, since it
knows what it asked.
In order to correctly handle head requests on a pipelined keep-alive
connection, a proxy would need to keep for each proxy-server
connection a map of all outstanding requests, indexed by URL and
sequence number, and recognize when a response was a response to a
head request. Further, on each response to a head request, it would
need to analyse the material following the header and try to guess
whether it was a new header, or an illegal body.
All that code sounds depressingly like hard work.
Received on Tue Aug 31 1999 - 14:21:27 MDT
This archive was generated by hypermail pre-2.1.9 : Tue Dec 09 2003 - 16:48:09 MST