reason phrase

[reschke]

8.1.2.:

"The response status line has been reduced to a single ":status" header field whose value specifies only the numeric response status code. The status text component of the HTTP/1.1 response has been dropped entirely."

Dropping the reason-phrase might break a few edge cases; is this worth it?

Maybe add a separate optional ":reason-phrase" header field?

[mnot]

Discussed in Seattle; no interest in carrying the reason phrase.

[thurt]

i'm curious what was the logical reason for dropping the reason phrase?

i was using the reason phrase as a title for messages presented to a user in the web browser client. i think most users are accustomed to such phrases, "Bad Request", "Not Found", etc. Now I will just have to write a mapping from status codes to my own reason phrases in the client.

[mnot]

The reason phrase -- even in HTTP/1.1 -- isn't guaranteed to be carried end-to-end; implementations can (and do) ignore it and substitute their own values (e.g., 200 is always "OK", no matter what happens on the wire).

Given that, and overhead in carrying the extra bytes, it made sense to drop it from the wire.