100715 - HTTP Response code 205 causes blank page or header to appear on page

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect)

Description

[Graham King]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20010913
BuildID:    2001091303

 When requesting a page that returns an HTTP response code of 205 (reset
content), the page appears blank. On hitting refresh the page appears with the
header on it.
 This worked fine in Mozilla 0.9.2 and previous down to 0.9 (not sure about
previous versions). It works fine in IE 5.5 and Netscape 4.7 and 6.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Browse to www.goldine.co.uk
2. Try hitting refresh.
3. This also happens on the following (adult) URLS:
 www.hunt4sex.com
 member-1.babylon-x.com:8080
 member-1.call-girls.net:8080
In fact, I think it happens on any site that returns 205 response code.

 I ([e-mail]) work for the company that hosts / runs all of the
above so if any server side info is needed please ask.
  

Actual Results:   Page appears blank. On hitting refresh the header appears in
the page.

Expected Results:   Page should be displayed normally.

 Here is the HTTP communication:
---
telnet www.goldline.co.uk 80

Trying 212.111.51.140...
Connected to www.goldline.co.uk.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /goldlinedev/GC/Global/GLHomeFrame.ghtml HTTP/1.1
Host: www.goldine.co.uk

HTTP/1.1 205 Reset Content
Cache-Control: no-store
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 10:28:29 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=@5d1e99:e904dc0925;path=/
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
Expires: Mon, 01 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT
Server: SilverStream Server/10.0
---

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

fixing url...

Comment 2

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

We never reset the form, but we did stay on the same page. Theres a test in the
test suite for this, but it can't tell what content is on the page; 205 is sort
of a strange case.

ns4 doesn't support this though - its part of http/1.1 not 1.0.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Over to http.

A few things:

1)  The server sends 'HTTP/1.0 205 Reset Content'.  Unfortunately, 205 is not
    defined in HTTP 1.0.  It _is_ in HTTP 1.1.

2)  What should our behavior be for undefined 2xx codes?  Should we just assume
    they are 200?

3)  In HTTP/1.1 (rfc 2068), we have:

     10.2.6 205 Reset Content
       The server has fulfilled the request and the user agent SHOULD reset
       the document view which caused the request to be sent. This response
       is primarily intended to allow input for actions to take place via
       user input, followed by a clearing of the form in which the input is
       given so that the user can easily initiate another input action. The
       response MUST NOT include an entity.

    So for the 205 response code there should be _no_ data after the headers.
    All that should happen is that the form whose submission triggered the 205
    response should be reset.  Looks like we ignore the data the server sends
    because per the http/1.1 spec there must not be any data there.

Comment 4

[Graham King]

Looks like the problem is our code sending a 205 when it should be a 200, and
Mozilla is behaving correctly. I will fix on next upgrade of our sites.
Thanks everyone for the info.
Status changed to INVALID.

Comment 5

[benc]

VERIFIED:
you can reopen if you find something wrong post-fix on your server.