IPP Mail Archive: RE: IPP> Chunked POST

RE: IPP> Chunked POST

Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com)
Wed, 16 Dec 1998 14:23:53 PST

> Many http server implementors seem to have interpreted the combination
> of these requirements to imply that a POST request without a
> Content-Length HTTP header cannot have a message-body.

This implication might have held for HTTP/1.0, but is wrong for HTTP/1.1.

> Indeed, I have tried several commercial web servers and
> in all cases, a servlet or CGI program gets end-of-file as soon as it
> tries to read the message-body input stream for a POST request with
> chunked transfer-coding.

Did these servers purport to support HTTP/1.1 for CGI scripts?
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Forum/Reports/ is a survey of
implementations, but we didn't ask implementations to distinguish
whether they supported 'chunked' transfer encoding specifically.

In any case, you left out the most obvious solution: don't use 'CGI'
to implement IPP.

However, it would be useful to update CGI for HTTP/1.1.

Larry