[cs631apue] HTTP 0.9 requests

[Jan Schaumann]

Tejas Nadkarni <tnadkarn at stevens.edu> wrote:
> To add to the confusion, different websites seem to handle this
> differently.

Yes, this is a common problem.  Different developers interpret the RFCs
differently, and sometimes a common implementation wins (in terms of
adoption) against the strict rules of an RFC or other standard.

It is my understanding of the definition of HTTP 0.9 that for any
request you would return immediately the contents of the file (if found)
and an HTML document describing the error if it wasn't found.

Given that HTTP 0.9 is not widely used at all, it is not surprising that
most servers reply with some version of HTTP/1.0 or above response.

It would be useful for your server to follow the stricter definition
here, though you do not need to generate all the right error responses.
For 0.9 errors, it should be sufficent to just return a generic error
page and not worry about the different cases.

However, I do believe that an 0.9 request should _not_ be answered with
an HTTP/1.0 response with headers etc.

-Jan