RFC 2965 (rfc2965) - Page 2 of 26
HTTP State Management Mechanism
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2965 HTTP State Management Mechanism October 2000
Host name (HN) means either the host domain name (HDN) or the numeric
Internet Protocol (IP) address of a host. The fully qualified domain
name is preferred; use of numeric IP addresses is strongly
discouraged.
The terms request-host and request-URI refer to the values the client
would send to the server as, respectively, the host (but not port)
and abs_path portions of the absoluteURI (http_URL) of the HTTP
request line. Note that request-host is a HN.
The term effective host name is related to host name. If a host name
contains no dots, the effective host name is that name with the
string .local appended to it. Otherwise the effective host name is
the same as the host name. Note that all effective host names
contain at least one dot.
The term request-port refers to the port portion of the absoluteURI
(http_URL) of the HTTP request line. If the absoluteURI has no
explicit port, the request-port is the HTTP default, 80. The
request-port of a cookie is the request-port of the request in which
a Set-Cookie2 response header was returned to the user agent.
Host names can be specified either as an IP address or a HDN string.
Sometimes we compare one host name with another. (Such comparisons
SHALL be case-insensitive.) Host A's name domain-matches host B's if
* their host name strings string-compare equal; or
* A is a HDN string and has the form NB, where N is a non-empty
name string, B has the form .B', and B' is a HDN string. (So,
x.y.com domain-matches .Y.com but not Y.com.)
Note that domain-match is not a commutative operation: a.b.c.com
domain-matches .c.com, but not the reverse.
The reach R of a host name H is defined as follows:
* If
- H is the host domain name of a host; and,
- H has the form A.B; and
- A has no embedded (that is, interior) dots; and
- B has at least one embedded dot, or B is the string "local".
then the reach of H is .B.
Kristol & Montulli Standards Track