>>>[And although it's considered harmless there, it is actually causing >>>data corruption with Mozilla, see >>>http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=245447 if you're interested.] >> >>wow, a HEAD request in the wild. nice. > > > Just for general information, mozilla (and browsers based upon it) > always do a HEAD before a GET if the user does a right-mouse-click > menu "Save Link Target As..." or does a "Save Page As...". This > recently caused me headaches with some of my mod_perl scripts that > were returning broken responses to the HEAD request.
along the same lines, I would think this is really a bug on both sides, and that the INVALID status of that bug report is wrong. certainly servers should be producing the proper response to a HEAD request, but clients should be more intelligent about things as well in the - HEAD requests are often mis-implemented, either with minor differences like the headers not really matching an identical GET request (very common), or just simply making GET and HEAD equivalent (like Registry mistakenly does in mp1). and it's not just little guys who are getting it wrong either: $ telnet www.yahoo.com 80 Trying 216.109.117.207... Connected to www.yahoo.com (216.109.117.207). Escape character is '^]'. HEAD / HTTP/1.1 host: www.yahoo.com HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sun, 06 Jun 2004 08:15:39 GMT P3P: policyref="http://p3p.yahoo.com/w3c/p3p.xml";, CP="CAO DSP COR CUR ADM DEV TAI PSA PSD IVAi IVDi CONi TELo OTPi OUR DELi SAMi OTRi UNRi PUBi IND PHY ONL UNI PUR FIN COM NAV INT DEM CNT STA POL HEA PRE GOV" Cache-Control: private Vary: User-Agent Connection: close Content-Type: text/html <html><head> <title>Yahoo!</title>... --Geoff -- Report problems: http://perl.apache.org/bugs/ Mail list info: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/modperl.html List etiquette: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/email-etiquette.html
