RFC 2616, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", June 1999

Note: This RFC has been obsoleted by RFC 7230, RFC 7231, RFC 7232, RFC 7233, RFC 7234, RFC 7235

Note: This RFC has been updated by RFC 2817, RFC 5785, RFC 6266, RFC 6585

Errata ID: 411
Status: Verified
Type: Editorial
Publication Format(s) : TEXT
Reported By: WooJin Chung
Date Reported: 2006-10-31
Verifier Name: Barry Leiba
Date Verified: 2014-06-03

Section 14.3 says:

The Accept-Encoding request-header field is similar to Accept, but
restricts the content-codings (section 3.5) that are acceptable in
the response.

       Accept-Encoding  = "Accept-Encoding" ":"

                          1#( codings [ ";" "q" "=" qvalue ] )
       codings          = ( content-coding | "*" )

 Examples of its use are:

       Accept-Encoding: compress, gzip
       Accept-Encoding:
       Accept-Encoding: *
       Accept-Encoding: compress;q=0.5, gzip;q=1.0
       Accept-Encoding: gzip;q=1.0, identity; q=0.5, *;q=0

It should say:

The Accept-Encoding request-header field is similar to Accept, but
restricts the content-codings (section 3.5) that are acceptable in
the response.

       Accept-Encoding  = "Accept-Encoding" ":"

                          1#( codings [ ";" "q" "=" qvalue ] )
       codings          = ( content-coding | "*" )

 Examples of its use are:

       Accept-Encoding: compress, gzip
       Accept-Encoding: *
       Accept-Encoding: compress;q=0.5, gzip;q=1.0
       Accept-Encoding: gzip;q=1.0, identity; q=0.5, *;q=0

Notes:

As you can see, Accept-Encoding has to consist of 1 or more ( codings [ ";"
"q" "=" qvalue ] ). So you can't just leave the value of "Accept-Encoding:"
empty. The second example is, therefore, incorrect.

------------------------------------------------
Alexey: This issue was fixed in HTTPBIS WG, see <http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/25>

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