[Web-SIG] PEP 444 Goals

[Alice Bevan–McGregor]

On 2011-01-06 13:06:36 -0800, James Y Knight said:

> On Jan 6, 2011, at 3:52 PM, Alice Bevan–McGregor wrote:
>> :: Making optional (and thus rarely-implemented) features non-optional. 
>> E.g. server support for HTTP/1.1 with clarifications for interfacing 
>> applications to 1.1 servers.  Thus pipelining, chunked encoding, et. 
>> al. as per the HTTP 1.1 RFC.
> 
> Requirements on the HTTP compliance of the server don't really have any 
> place in the WSGI spec. You should be able to be WSGI compliant even if 
> you don't use the HTTP transport at all (e.g. maybe you just send 
> around requests via SCGI).
> The original spec got this right: chunking etc are something which is 
> not relevant to the wsgi application code -- it is up to the server to 
> implement the HTTP transport according to the HTTP spec, if it's 
> purporting to be an HTTP server.

Chunking is actually quite relevant to the specification, as WSGI and 
PEP 444 / WSGI 2 (damn, that's getting tedious to keep dual-typing ;) 
allow for chunked bodies regardless of higher-level support for 
chunking.  The body iterator.  Previously you /had/ to define a length, 
with chunked encoding at the server level, you don't.

I agree, however, that not all gateways will be able to implement the 
relevant HTTP/1.1 features.  FastCGI does, SCGI after a quick Google 
search, seems to support it as well. I should re-word it as:

"For those servers capable of HTTP/1.1 features the implementation of 
such features is required."

+1

	- Alice.