Concurrent non-error response disallowed. ("clarification of 7.2.2. Monitoring Connections for Error Status Messages")

This email is a follow-up to the previous thread -�"clarification of
7.2.2. Monitoring Connections for Error Status Messages". Thanks for
all the replies!

We seem to agree that "concurrent" non-error response is NOT
compatible with the spec, on the following grounds:

1. a non-error response status implies/requires the server seeing the
complete request body.
==> 200 status doesn't necessarily guarantee a complete/successful
response end-to-end, due to interim server-processing or communication
failure (Wenbo Zhu).

2. existing clients won't be able to handle concurrent non-error
responses, i.e. when the request is still in transmission.
==> some clients do seem to "work" (Jamie Lokier)

3. proxies may have problems to continue transmitting request data
after the response arrives.
==> most of them are able to handle response data when the request is
still in transmission (Henrik Nordstr�m)

However, as Mark Nottingham pointed out at the same time, the above
interpretation isn't explicitly supported by the current
specification. Therefore I suggest the spec include a clear
clarification on the requirement that concurrent non-error responses
are disallowed, to avoid possible ambiguity.

- Wenbo

Received on Friday, 14 May 2010 07:13:43 UTC