Re: What is Content-Length?
Scott Lawrence (lawrence@agranat.com)
Thu, 11 Dec 1997 09:47:37 -0500
This is getting out of hand. We have multiple interoperable
implementations in which the current definition of content length
and its interaction with transfer encoding has been shown to work.
However flawed it may be in some theoretical sense, it does work and
should not be changed, nor should any other header to carry a length
be added, unless it can be shown that it actual practice something
is broken.
As for the digest authentication entity digest, the content length
is not one of the elements that presents a problem, since it does
not change based on the transfer encoding. If the digest
information is sent in a chunked trailer then the length is known at
the time the entity-digest is computed, even if it was not known
when the headers were sent (in which case there is no Content-Length
header field). We do have some _other_ problems to resolve with the
entity-digest calculation in face of proxies adding headers, but
this is not one of them.
--
Scott Lawrence EmWeb Embedded Server <lawrence@agranat.com>
Agranat Systems, Inc. Engineering http://www.agranat.com/