[Python-Dev] Remove HTTP 0.9 support (original) (raw)

Senthil Kumaran orsenthil at gmail.com
Thu Dec 16 17:52:14 CET 2010

On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 02:20:37PM +0100, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

> > Try e.g. www.mozilla.org or www.google.com or www.msn.com. > > (but www.python.org or www.apache.org still have the legacy behaviour) > > What legacy behavior did you observe in these?

-> Request: xyzzy -> Response: (notice how the response has no headers)

Well, Error response without headers was observed in www.mozilla.org and www.google.com for Invalid requests.

But, I observed something surprising at www.apache.org If you do GET / HTTP/1.0 You do get the valid Response with headers.

But if you do GET / You get a valid response Without headers.

I was afraid if this behavior was to support HTTP 0.9 style where the the reponse is sent without the headers.

Actually, it is turning out to be true:

http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/rfc1945.html#Response

According to HTTP 1.0, When a request is Simple-Request, it means a VERB URL (without a version) and it generally corresponds to HTTP 0.9 And when a server receives such a Simple-Request, it sends a Simple-Response where it does not send the headers back.

I think, the same is exhibited by other Servers as well www.google.com, www.mozilla.org where for Invalid Request without version, you are sending a Simple-Request (HTTP 0.9) style and getting the corresponding response.

Given these, any assumption that servers no longer support HTTP/0.9 becomes false. So nuking it will require some thought.

-- Senthil

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