Re: HTTP 1.1: Horse out of the barn

Daniel DuBois (dan@spyglass.com)
Mon, 19 Aug 1996 12:49:48 -0700


The following is off topic for this group, but I had to followup.

At 11:00 AM 8/19/96 -0400, John C. Mallery wrote:
>http://www.macweek.com/mw_1032/gw_telefinder.html

It's bad enough they claim HTTP/1.1 conformance before the spec is
finalized. The worst part is, it's a really crappy product.

- It's support for persistent connections consists of sending "Connection:
  close".
- It spits out TWO response lines/codes on a HEAD (neither of which is
  appropriate for the error entity body they send along with it).
- For ANY method, you don't even have the opportunity to input HTTP headers
  before it spits out a response.  How the heck it can support the Host=
 header
  is beyond me.  Maybe they expect all the headers to be in the first packet
  (lame lame), or maybe they treat CRLF as CRCR (lame lame), which they=
 can't
  legally do anyway.

----BEGIN
rafiki SunOS5.5 users/ddubois 1150>telnet spiderisland.com 80
Trying 199.35.3.99...
Connected to spiderisland.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.0 501 Not Implemented
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
MIME-Version: 1.0
Server: TeleFinder/5.1.0 b15
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 1996 19:33:55 GMT
Last-modified: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 21:35:11 GMT
Content-type: text/html
Content-Length: 841


404 Not Found Connection closed by foreign host.m/~attention_design/
br>A>
rafiki SunOS5.5 users/ddubois 1151>telnet spiderisland.com 80 Trying 199.35.3.99... Connected to spiderisland.com. Escape character is '^]'. GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.0 200 OK MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: TeleFinder/5.1.0 b15 Date: Mon, 19 Aug 1996 19:35:37 GMT ---END I especially dislike the footer. Mentioning competing and likely vastly superior product names in the comments 10 times each at the bottom of your web page is in the poorest possible taste, embedded illigal characters, invalid HTML, misspellings aside. ---BEGIN

July 25, 1996 -- =A9Copyright 1996, Spider Island Software

All products mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
---END ----- Daniel DuBois, Traveling Coderman http://www.spyglass.com/~ddubois/ A polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.