proxies not supporting certain methods

[julian.reschke@…]

Part 2, 9.1 says:

"A proxy MUST NOT modify the Allow header field even if it does not understand all the methods specified, since the user agent might have other means of communicating with the origin server."

That is *very* misleading as it implies that it's somehow ok for a proxy not to implement a method it doesn't know about. However, the transmission semantics for methods are generic (see Part 1, except for a few well-defined exceptions).

See related issue #53.

[mnot@…]

I don't follow. It says "understand", not "implement." I.e., it doesn't imply that the proxy will reject the message, just that it doesn't recognise the method.

Perhaps it would be better to have a short introductory section about what it means for implementations to understand a method, status code, etc.? This might be useful for other situations as well.

[julian.reschke@…]

The point I was trying to make is that proxies do not *have* to "understand" method to handle it properly; generic handling should be fine, right?

[mnot@…]

Of course. I think this is editorial; flip back to design if you disagree.

[julian.reschke@…]

Proposal:

"A proxy MUST NOT modify the Allow header field -- it doesn't need to understand all the methods specified in order to handle them according to the generic message handling rules."

[julian.reschke@…]

From [1068]:

clarify proxy requirements wrt not-understood methods (see #226)