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I can't tell from RFC 2616 whether an HTTP client should accept a 204 No Content response that includes Content-Length: 0 or Transfer-Encoding: chunked headers. These headers seem to break some HTTP clients and proxies, which apparently attempt to read the empty response body, but the spec reads:
- Any response message which "MUST NOT" include a message-body (such as the 1xx, 204, and 304 responses and any response to a HEAD request) is always terminated by the first empty line after the header fields, regardless of the entity-header fields present in the message.
To me "regardless of the entity-header fields" implies that clients should tolerate this state of affairs. The Erlang HTTP library chose this interpretation. However, lighthttpd and IBM chose the opposite interpretation -- that the server should not include these headers for responses that are prohibited from having bodies.
So should the web application remove those headers from the response, or should the network infrastructure and clients tolerate those headers on 204 No Content, 304 Not Modified, etc. ?
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The HTTP 204 No Content success status response code indicates that a request has succeeded, but that the client doesn't need to navigate away from its current page. This might be used, for example, when implementing "save and continue editing" functionality for a wiki site.
10.2.5 204 No ContentThe server has fulfilled the request but does not need to return an entity-body, and might want to return updated metainformation. The response MAY include new or updated metainformation in the form of entity-headers, which if present SHOULD be associated with the requested variant.
By default, 204 (No Content) the response is cacheable. If caching needs to be overridden then the response must include cache respective cache headers. For example, you may want to return status 204 (No Content) in UPDATE operations where request payload is large enough not to transport back and forth.
14.13 Content-Length The Content-Length entity-header field indicates the size of the entity-body, in decimal number of OCTETs, sent to the recipient or, in the case of the HEAD method, the size of the entity-body that would have been sent had the request been a GET.
According to the RFC7230 (please see https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-3.3.1) at the end of Page 29 it states:
A server MUST NOT send a Transfer-Encoding header field in any response with a status code of 1xx (Informational) or 204 (No Content).
Therefore the web application should not send those headers with the response.
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