Re: NUDGE: Our piece on Host: and URLs (Fwd)
Dave Kristol (dmk@research.bell-labs.com)
Sat, 10 May 97 17:06:11 EDT
"David W. Morris" <dwm@xpasc.com> wrote:
> [...]
> On Sat, 10 May 1997, Benjamin Franz wrote:
> > [...]
> > An attempt to chop FQDNs down to the host feels to me like the kind of
> > protocal 'shortcut' (Shortcut: Noun; A path or course of action taken by
> > lazy people that only takes twice as much time and effort as the original
> > path or course of action would have taken.) that created the problem that
> > Host: solves in the first place - ambiguous identification of multiple web
> > servers sharing a single IP address. Why take a step *backwards* for the
> > sake of people's lazyness in typing?
>
> Excuse me... who are we serving here? Users or server and DNS operators. A
> major step backwards exists if we insist that a user type a FQDN and the
> client magically know it is or is not a FQDN so the protocol can demand
> that a host: field include a FQDN for the portion of content providers who
> use virtual hosts.
>
> I'm not a DNS expert, but my understanding/recollection is that for www to
> resolve, the DNS must be configured to allow such a resolution. If I'm
> wrong, then fix the DNS configurations, demanding users be forced to type
> a FQDN is giant step backward.
I think Benjamin Franz has made an incorrect assumption. There is no
"attempt to chop FQDNs down to the host". I thought the rule of thumb
was to be that the Host header should contain the host/port portion of
the URL exactly as it appears in the URL. Therefore, except when a
user enters a URL by hand, the content provider typically controls
what's in the URL and, therefore, what gets passed in Host. If an HTML
page contains a URL with a FQDN, that's what would appear in the Host
header.
Dave Kristol