[Web-SIG] PEP 444 Goals

[James Y Knight]

On Jan 6, 2011, at 4:56 PM, Alice Bevan–McGregor wrote:

> 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.

No you don't -- HTTP 1.0 allows indeterminate-length output. The server simply must close the connection to indicate the end of the response if either the client version HTTP/1.0, or the server doesn't implement HTTP/1.1. 

James