Re: Content-length header

Andrew M. Bishop wrote:
> Joerg Sommer <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> 
>>what's the state of the content-length header? Do you plan to activate it
>>in the next release? Do you have a patch to do this? I don't configure
>>wwwoffle to changes the sites it ships, so there is no reason to not
>>provide the content-length header.
> 
> 
> I will not be including any code to insert the Content-Length header
> and I do not have a patch that would add it.
> 
> It was a major relief to be able to remove the code in the first
> place, it has been the cause of several bugs over the years.  New
> features in WWWOFFLE (chunked encoding, compressed pages, removal of
> temporary files) means that it was getting less and less possible to
> even have the header.
> 
> I know that there are some special cases when a header would work, but
> recognising all of them makes the code complicated.  I have to live
> with this code, edit it and maintain it; not having the Content-Length
> makes my life easier and lets me add other features.


For what it's worth, I do not agree with Andrew's assessment. When 
downloading a fairly large file, a Content-Length header enables the 
browser (or wget or whatever) to display a progress bar, which I find 
very useful.

In the version of WWWOFFLE that I maintain for personal use, I try to 
retain the Content-Length header or even add one when the length of the 
response to the client can be known in advance. I do not use chunked 
encoding in this case.

-- 
Paul Rombouts