Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
....
We're now talking about caching, and I totally agree that more
clarifications are required here (I was referring to the actual
message transmission in my reply).
Caching most certainly affects the message transmission behavior of a
caching client library (which is what most browser-hosted XMLHttpRequest
implementations would use).
Understood and agreed. In my initial response I was speaking about
message transmission only; as far as I can tell, a
servers/intermediaries doing no caching at all are still compliant; so
caching is truly optional. Yes, I know that's not helpful for the
implementations we talk about.
> ...
Are you saying that handling of conditionals is different for GET?
Pointer?
I honestly couldn't understand which aspects were meant to apply only to
GET and which to all methods, so I'll withdraw this example. The
discussion of GET has an extended discussion of how some headers make it
a "conditional GET" or "range GET" which is lacking for the other
methods, but the prose describing those headers is not clear about their
applicability. Section 14.25 describing If-Modified-Since sounds like it
applies to all methods, but also specifically describes the behavior for
GET.
In the meantime I have followed up over on the HTTP-WG mailing list.
Yes, spec text like that is confusing, and I think it should be reorganized.
...
I agree, and actually I am now encouraged to raise issues with the
HTTPbis WG about things in the spec that seem unclear.
Great.
I think my bottom line is the same as Boris's, I would like to see the
spec allow XHR implementations not to send GETs with an entity-body.
I would argue that both the simplest thing and the right thing here is
not to state anything at all, and let RFC2616bis clarify.
BR, Julian
