I was checking out the headers on LiveJournal, by telnetting to port 80 and issuing the command
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: vyxn.livejournal.com
the content was returned:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2001 20:11:06 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.19 (Unix) balanced_by_mod_backhand/1.1.1pre5 mod_fastcgi/2.2.10
Cache-Control: private, proxy-revalidate
Content-length: 40952
Vary: Host
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
y</a><br>
</code>
</font>
<br>my body is trying to fool me<br><br>its going "hey, doesnt that couch look c
... and basically lots more HTML down to the bottom of my livejournal page. But you see - that content isnt ALL of my livejournal, its only from the middle of the fourth post down. And anyway, a HEAD shouldn't be returning page content should it ?
not sure if its a bug, some bizarre purposeful thing, or something else. and im drawing as much attention to the fact that partial content is being returned as i am that ANY content is being returned - i dont see why LJ would cut off the just first three posts of my LJ when responding.
And its not a user.livejournal thing only:
HEAD /~xejon/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.livejournal.com
will return the same thing - content from a certain point down.
And according to RFC2616, it's non compliant...
9.4 HEAD
The HEAD method is identical to GET except that the server MUST NOT return a message-body in the response. The metainformation contained in the HTTP headers in response to a HEAD request SHOULD be identical to the information sent in response to a GET request.
it is returning content on HEAD. however, the headers are the same (which incidentally means that the content-length that the HEAD request sends doesnt tally with the content)
(update: there's no proxy server in the way, transparent or otherwise)
