Re: Comments on Byte range draft

On Mon, 13 Nov 1995, Lou Montulli wrote:

> 
> But your concerns are not valid.  Neither of the two most used proxy
> servers (CERN and Netscape) will cache objects that are not returned
> with a 200 status.  If there are any other proxy servers that do
> cache non-200 requests then they are clearly in violation of the
> HTTP spec.
> 
Unfortunately, this isn't true. The rule is: if you see a response code 
that you don't understand, you must treat it as if the code was <N>00, 
where <N> is the first character of the response code. Thus, a conformant 
HTTP/1.0 system should treat a code '205' as code '200'. 

It's in the last paragraph of section 6.1:
---
HTTP status codes are extensible, but the above codes are the only
   ones generally recognized in current practice. HTTP applications are
   not required to understand the meaning of all registered status codes,
   though such understanding is obviously desirable. However,
   applications must understand the class of any status code, as
   indicated by the first digit, and treat any unknown response as being
   equivalent to the x00 status code of that class. For example, if an
---

Received on Monday, 13 November 1995 16:37:39 UTC