Re: NUDGE: Our piece on Host: and URLs (Fwd)
David W. Morris (dwm@xpasc.com)
Sat, 10 May 1997 09:54:52 -0700 (PDT)
On Sat, 10 May 1997, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> >> Ok I've reviewed the 1.1 draft, If I remember correctly,
> >>we agreed to make host be FQDN.
> >
> >Yup.
> >
> >>Did we agree on any special cases which need to be included in the
> >>draft?
> >
> >No, we agreed that there were no special cases.
>
> Why? There is currently no need for host to be an FQDN, for either
> the Host field-value or a full-URL. Please explain.
I agree with Roy ... we recently had a new rehash of the question and
it was/is quite clear that is is unreasonable to expect a client to
fabricate a FQDN for the host field if it wasn't in the URL. The whole
purpose of the Host: field is satisified if the field is simply filled in
with the host:port portion of the URL.
There are many (orders of magnitude) more cases where a client would find
it impossible to create a FQDN than the obscure configuration where a
client can use a partial name to locate the server BUT the server can't
use that partial name to properly identify a virtual document root.
Dave Morris