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Appendices
B. Minimum Compliance
Early reviews of this specification have indicated the need for a statement of the minimum requirements for an implementation to be considered in compliance with HTTP/1.0. This section will be written soon.
Note
The primary difficulty in determining a standard for minimum compliance rests in the fact that HTTP is a flexible protocol which can be used for many purposes. The requirements for special purpose applications often differ from those of general purpose applications.
B.1 Servers
Servers have a special responsibility for being honest when generating their responses to requesting clients. The Status-Code sent in the Status-Line must correspond to the actual action taken by the server. This is especially the case when the method used in the request is one of PUT, POST, DELETE, LINK, and UNLINK. If a Status-Code of 200 is returned, the client must be able to assume that the action has been carried out. If the server is not able to fulfill the requested action immediately, the correct status code to use is "202 Accepted".
The methods GET and HEAD must be supported by all general-purpose servers. Servers which provide Last-Modified dates for resources must also support the conditional GET method.
T. Berners-Lee, R. T. Fielding, H. Frystyk Nielsen - 12 MAR 95
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