Connection closing

[mnot@…]

The phrase "unless the message is terminated by closing the connection" in Section 4.4 is unnecessary.

Section 3.6 uses the same phrase; it is a little confusing. In 4.4 you could almost read it to mean that presence of "Connection: close" would mean that a T-E header should be ignored, which is presumably not the intent (and certainly not the practice).

[mnot@…]

Revised proposal:

p1 4.4, "Message Length":

2. If the Transfer-Encoding header field (section 14.41) is present and contains the "chunked" value, the transfer-length is defined by the use of the "chunked" transfer encoding.

p1 3.4, "Transfer Codings":

Whenever a transfer-coding is applied to a message-body, the set of transfer-codings MUST include "chunked", unless the message indicates it is terminated by closing the connection.

[julian.reschke@…]

Proposed patch.

[julian.reschke@…]

Proposed patch.

[julian.reschke@…]

Fixed in [276]:

Resolve #28: clarify connection closing vs chunked encoding (closes #28).

[fielding@…]

I don't think the committed text clarifies the issue.

Message length should be defined entirely by the message parsing algorithm (currently in 4.4, but destined to move up). The odd text in 3.4 should be in the parsing algorithm, not hidden away in the transfer-coding definitions.

Reopening so that we can look at it again after the message parsing text is reorganized.

[fielding@…]

From [852]:

Changed message-body ABNF to be *OCTET. Specifying the actual number of octets will have to be done in prose.

Moved mistitled "Message Length" section into the Message Body section, since it only explains how many octets are in the body. Deleted useless "Entity Length" section and transfer-length term.

Addresses #28: Connection closing

Removed redundant mention of terminating by connection close and rewrote explanation so that it doesn't self-contradict.

Addresses #90: Delimiting messages with multipart/byteranges

Removed message-delimiting paragraphs of multipart/byteranges from p1 and p3.

Addresses #95: Handling multiple Content-Length headers

Added requirements for what to do if multiple or invalid Content-Length is received.

Rephrased requirements for Transfer-Encoding to only apply when a transfer-coding is present. Clarify that Transfer-Encoding overrides Content-Length and treat receiving both as an error. Clarify that only the chunked transfer-coding can delimit a message (the original design allowed other self-descriptive encodings, but that was abandoned in 2616).

Addresses #109: Clarify entity / representation / variant terminology

Entity-body terminology changed to payload in order to clarify that it is what gets packaged (as a message-body) into a message, allowing us to (eventually) distinguish between messages containing whole representations and messages containing only partial representations. Reduce use of the same terms for other things (e.g., in explanation of dates).

[fielding@…]

From [872]:

Addresses #28: Connection closing

Finished clarification of when closing the connection is required for message delimiting.

[fielding@…]

Incorporated as part of rewriting the message body length section and clarifying the requirements on chunked.

[julian.reschke@…]

From [876]:

note work done in [872] (see #28)