[Fwd: guideline for name-based web hosting justification]

[Bennett Todd]

Kim Scarborough:
> That's a name-based site. It shares an IP with several sites I
> host. So obviously, that's not an accurate way to check if people
> will load the site--nearly half of this site's hits are from 1.0
> requests, and yet it manages to get the site fine. I'm not sure
> how this works--perhaps the browsers are misidentifying the HTTP
> version in their requests?--but I can assure you, it does.

It's not a matter of misidentifying the HTTP version.

Rather, HTTP is a quite simple protocol with all kinds of forwards
and backwards compatibility. HTTP/1.0 is the basic minimum needed
for most things to work. HTTP/1.1 is a pretty richly enhanced
superset of that functionality. The only thing required (AFAIK) for
name virtual hosts to work is the Host: header, which all http
clients send and have for years, since before HTTP/1.1 was frozen.

Modern clients are still written that send queries calling
themselves HTTP/1.0; that's the right thing to do if the client
doesn't implement _all_ of HTTP/1.1. But they still send that Host:
header.

-Bennett
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