🚀 go-pugleaf

[ I'm crossposting to Demon, since they haven't replied to my email
  on the subject, maybe someone @demon will see it here instead ]


In article <vU13JXAfado+EwVX@merlyn.demon.co.uk>, one of infinite monkeys
	at the keyboard of Dr John Stockton <spam@merlyn.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>>There's some background to this: John emailed me a few days ago that
>>Page Valet was complaining of bad HTTP and bailing out on his page.
> 
> That's a little unfair; it was a problem report.

Sorry, it wasn't meant to be critical of you.  Quite the reverse!
It's a bug in Demon's server, and Valet benefits from handling it
and issuing a sensible error message rather than a generic "bad HTTP".

>>I checked it out, and find that it is indeed seriously broken, although
>>the fault appears to be with Demon rather than with John.  I've also
>>updated Page Valet to error-correct this particular broken HTTP, and
>>just issue a warning message about it.
> 
> It is not seriously broken, since browsers and other testers seem to
> have no problem with the pages.  But there may be a breach of RFC2616.
> I believe that my *.htm pages are uploaded (from a PC) in UNIX-text
> mode, and are stored with the line separator being LF; and that I could
> easily change this.

The line endings in your page are irrelevant to HTTP - you can use DOS,
Mac, Unix or none at all without problems (it's when you upload a CGI
script from non-Unix you have to worry about them - but that's a
shell issue, not an HTTP protocol one).

It's the HTTP status line and headers that are malformed.
An HTTP response is required to take (with example values) the form:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n
Server: good-server\r\n
Date: Sun Apr 20 12:30:16 BST 2003\r\n
Connection: close\r\n
Content-Type: text/html;charset=latin1\r\n
Content-length: 1234\r\n
\r\n
[ HTML document here; this is just misc bytes as far as HTTP is concerned ]

Demon is instead serving:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n
Server: broken-server\n
Date: Sun Apr 20 12:30:16 BST 2003\n
Connection: close\n
Content-Type: text/html;charset=latin1\n
Content-length: 1234\n
\n
[ HTML document here; this is just misc bytes as far as HTTP is concerned ]


This is malformed, and requires error correction to work.

-- 
Nick Kew

Available for contract work - Programming, Unix, Networking, Markup, etc.