[erlang-questions] Re: Any HTTP 1.0 clients out there?

[Steve Davis]

Hi Oscar,

The environment is not at all controlled.

Ah yes - Lynx is an interesting use case. I understand Lynx has a 
following in the financial sector, and so it definitely counts as 
"commercially relevant". I will investigate further to see what happens 
with Lynx when faced with an "HTTP/1.1 only" server. It may well tip the 
balance.

My view is that server leniency has allowed MSIE, amongst others, to get 
away with far too much, and caused a great deal of unnecessary and 
frustrating hours in development. This abuse of the spirit of RFC 
2616/HTTP1.1 has, I believe, actually held up the growth of the web - 
quite the opposite of the intentions of Berners-Lee/Fielding back in the 
90's when HTTP was devised and the concept of leniency was "good".

Many applications are now connection-orientated and far richer than just 
apache-style "serve media files" roots. Ideally, we would even have 
client-server ubf-style contracts; this view means the "right thing to 
do" would be to "just say no" to "old" clients in a standards-compliant 
way, and move on.

Lynx may well be the use case that stops me doing this.

Regards,
Steve


Oscar Hellström wrote:
> Hi Steve,
> 
> I guess that depends on what kind of clients you will have. If you have
> a controlled set of clients it would be very easy to make sure that
> there are no HTTP/1.0 clients, but in a scenario where clients is the
> general public I think you might still get some HTTP/1.0 clients. For
> instance, lynx on my machine (,2.8.6rel.5 libwww-FM/2.14...) is claiming
> to be an HTTP/1.0 client while links (ELinks/0.11.1-1.2etch...) on
> another machine of mine is using HTTP/1.1. I do use lynx and links every
> now and then, but I don't know if I would be a relevant user of your
> application.
> 
> Steve Davis wrote:
>> Hi Oscar,
>>
>> My interest is in whether it is at all relevant to support HTTP/1.0 on
>> a server any more - currently I've stripped out that code and just
>> return status 505 (HTTP version not supported).
>>
>> Regards,
>> Steve
>>
>> ________________________________________________________________
>> erlang-questions mailing list. See http://www.erlang.org/faq.html
>> erlang-questions (at) erlang.org
>>
>>   
> 
> Best regards
>