205 Bodies

[mnot@…]

RFC2616 Section 4.3 "Message Body" enumerates those messages that don't include a message-body;

All 1xx (informational), 204 (no content), and 304 (not modified) responses MUST NOT include a message-body. All other responses do include a message-body, although it MAY be of zero length.

However, it does not list 205 (section 10.2.6).

Also if you look at the texts for 204, 304 and 205 responses, you see that 204 and 304 say "MUST NOT include a message-body", whereas 205 says "MUST NOT include an entity". 204 and 304 go on to say that the message is terminated at the first empty line, but 205 does not say that.

[mnot@…]

Proposals:

• ​http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/2002JanApr/0022.html
• ​http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2004JulSep/0084.html

[julian.reschke@…]

proposed change for part 1, clarifying that 1xx, 204, 304 are all the exceptions to parsing

[julian.reschke@…]

From [600]:

Take out language that implied that there may be methods for which a request body MUST NOT be included (related to #88)

[mnot@…]

Setting priority to low; Roy wants to do parsing clean-up and terminology revision before addressing this.

[mnot@…]

proposal: remove requirement altogether (i.e., 205 response bodies don't have any defined semantic, but like the rest of HTTP, there has to be a body there, even if it is 0 length)

[julian.reschke@…]

Patch for part 2, clarifying the 205 requirement

[julian.reschke@…]

From [1058]:

Clarify 205's constraints for the message body (see #88)

[fielding@…]

From [2353]:

Restore the ability for 205 responses to be sent with a zero-length chunked body; addresses #491 and related to #88