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TickleSteve parent
He was referring to HTTP 1.0 & 1.1
mannyv
Parts of 1.1 are pretty complicated if you try and implement them. Parts of it are simple.

The whole section on cache is "reality based," and it's only gotten worse as the years have moved on.

Anyway, back in the day Content-Length was one of the fields you were never supposed to trust. There's really no reason to trust it now, but I suppose you can use it as a hint to see amount of buffer you're supposed to allocate. But of course, the content length may exceed that length, which would mean that if you did it incorrectly you'd copy the incoming request data past the end of the buffer.

So even today, don't trust Content-Length.

treflop
You can’t trust lengths in any protocol or format.
_ache_
Should have say that so (Nowhere does the article say ‘up to HTTP/1.1’ even talking about HTTP/2 and HTTP/3).

HTTP/1.0 is simple. HTTP/1.1 is undoubtedly more complex but manageable.

The statement that HTTP is simple is just not true. Even if Go makes it look easy.

Cthulhu_
Every example in the article explicitly states HTTP 1.1, only at the end does it have a remark about how HTTP 2 and 3 don't have chunking as they have their own streaming mechanisms. The basic HTTP protocol is simple, but 2/3 are no longer the basic HTTP protocols.
_ache_
My point is HTTP isn't HTTP/1.1. There is a lot under the wood, even with HTTP/1.1. Actually, the fact that the whole article explains an implementation of an HTTP header is against the fact that it's simple.

So when the article say "All HTTP requests look something like this", that's false, that is not a big deal but it spread that idea that HTTP is easy and it's not.

lionkor
Which is reasonably simple that you can build a complete 1.0 server in C in an afternoon, and add some 1.1 stuff like keep-alives, content-length, etc. I did that for fun once, on github.com/lionkor/http
secondcoming
That’s the easy part. The hard part is working around non-compliant third parties. HTTP is a real mess.
ozim
That's pretty much every protocol and working around non-compliant third parties is not specific protocol problem ;)
dbrueck
The HTTP 1.1 spec isn't 175 pages long just for the fun of it. :)

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