HTTP-Version should be redefined as fixed length pair of DIGIT . DIGIT

[fielding@…]

HTTP/1.0 and 1.1 were designed based on the theory that many versions might be needed as message requirements changed over time and that the minor version would be incremented each time a significant new requirement was added. However, the WG has long since ossified around a single version as "the standard" and failed to increment the minor version even when RFC2616 introduced incompatible features (that have proven to be useless in practice because of that failure).

Since it is now unlikely that there will ever be more than ten minor versions of HTTP, let alone ten major versions, and since it is a common implementation practice to use a fixed-length mask of HTTP/n.n to find and parse the version number, I suggest that we simply replace

   HTTP-Version   = "HTTP" "/" 1*DIGIT "." 1*DIGIT

with

   HTTP-Version   = "HTTP" "/" DIGIT "." DIGIT

[mnot@…]

+1

[mnot@…]

No objections; please incorporate.

[julian.reschke@…]

proposed patch

[julian.reschke@…]

From [1313]:

make HTTP version numbers single digits (see #273)