HTTPbis WG is wondering if they should change the version number of HTTP and in which ways. A bug has been opened to define the version number as a fixed length pair of Digit. Willy Tarreau mentionned that
Too many implementations I’ve seen just check for ver[7] == ‘1’ or just memcmp(ver, “HTTP/1.1”, 8). If we ever decide to use 1.10 as a valid value, we’ll get a lot of trouble due to that.
It reminds me of the hell of Opera versioning
But in my opinion, the real questions are:
- What are the most common libraries with different behavior/code path depending on the HTTP version number
- How many of these libraries will break if the version number is misinterpreted?