emma

emma OP wrote

Reply to comment by nitori in "jstpst" by emma

they seem to be telling me that, yes.

also a month ago they coincidentally wanted to register "raddle" as a trademark, too. very unfortuate that every trademark they want to register is already in use by a postmill site.

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emma wrote

ok so i've looked into this, and on a postmill instance that uses cloudflare + nginx, i cannot reproduce the issue, it seems to work fine. i can only imagine it's a problem between caddy and whatever http client newsblur uses.

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emma wrote (edited )

but rereading the spec, you're supposed to send a 505 in the representation used by the major version requested by the client

GET / HTTP/2.0 is parsed with http/1 semantics, so i think it makes sense to give any >= 2.x version the HTTP/1.1 505 treatment.

An HTTP/2 request can be sent without negotiation; this is how h2c (HTTP/2 over cleartext) reliably works for me (for some reason I couldn't get Upgrade from http/1.1 to h2c working). It's called "prior knowledge", and curl supports this.

yeah, but as the name implies, you somehow know in advance that the server's gonna accept HTTP/2 if you send those. i suppose 505 here would make sense, if the HTTP/2 support was ever removed. as i understand it, this mode is never going to happen under normal browsing, though.

No, 505 wouldn't be useful because an HTTP/2 request to an HTTP/1-only server would only result in the client just closing the connection itself. You can see this by using nghttp or curl --http2-prior-knowledge against a server that only supports HTTP/1

An HTTP/2-only client (which those two commands earlier are) would not bother to process an HTTP/1 response (if it even gets one) whether that'd be a 505 or 200.

i meant a hypothetical http/2 that's more http/1-like, not the actual http/2 that came into existence which made it very hard to accidentally use the wrong protocol.

anyway, the solution to your woes is apparently to send an error packet or whatever:

HTTP_1_1_REQUIRED (0x0d):
The endpoint requires that HTTP/1.1 be used instead of HTTP/2.

it sounds like it does what you want, but i have no idea if this applies on the stream or the connection level or what.

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emma wrote

I mean the same applies if an HTTP/1 response is a 505, right..?

no, since http/1 requests are sent preemptively without knowing if the server accepts them. http/2+ requests are sent after negotiation, at which point it's established they are accepted. this obsoletes the need for a 505.

505 would have been useful for a future where http/2 requests might be preemptively sent to http/1-only servers. if i send GET / HTTP/2.0 (or any non-1.x version) to nginx, it indeed responds with that status code. but as things turned out, the negotiation mechanism in http/2+ just sidesteps this problem altogether, so 505 ends up being little more than a relic from a time when people didn't know what the future of http held.

since you very much have to opt in for http/2+, incompatibilities with it can be resolved by just not enabling it, and the use cases where one would want partial http/2 support on any given host are extremely contrived, i would argue it's a good thing that support for it is declared on the connection level. it's one less special case for clients to deal with.

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