[Web-SIG] PEP 444 Goals

[James Y Knight]

On Jan 7, 2011, at 12:13 AM, Alice Bevan–McGregor wrote:

> On 2011-01-06 14:14:32 -0800, Alice Bevan–McGregor said:
>> There was something, somewhere I was reading related to WSGI about requiring content-length... but no matter.
> 
> Right, I remember now: the HTTP 1.0 specification.  (Honestly not trying to sound sarcastic!)  See:
> 
> 	http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/1.0/draft-ietf-http-spec.html#Entity-Body

You've misread that section. In HTTP/1.0, *requests* were required to have a Content-Length if they had a body (HTTP 1.1 fixed that with chunked request support). Responses have never had that restriction: they have always (even since before HTTP 1.0) been allowed to omit Content-Length and terminate by closing the socket. 

HTTP 1.1 didn't really add any new functionality to *responses* by adding chunking, simply bit of efficiency and error detection ability.

James