> In the real world there are bugs in TCP stacks and in HTTP implementations that cause HTTP traffic to get corrupted
I'm very much aware of this. Hence why I expressed surprise that such checksumming was not commonly performed at the application layer.
> There is no standard way to do it; what you mention there is an esoteric feature.
The Content-MD5 header is defined in RFC 2616. It is, by definition, standard. If it's not widely supported, then I think that it would behoove the people who care about these things to switch to servers/clients which do support it.
(I suspect the intersection between "people who know/care how to use md5sum" and "people who know how to set/read an arbitrary HTTP header" is fairly large. Hence my surprise at the common practice of ignoring this capability.)
I'm very much aware of this. Hence why I expressed surprise that such checksumming was not commonly performed at the application layer.
> There is no standard way to do it; what you mention there is an esoteric feature.
The Content-MD5 header is defined in RFC 2616. It is, by definition, standard. If it's not widely supported, then I think that it would behoove the people who care about these things to switch to servers/clients which do support it.
(I suspect the intersection between "people who know/care how to use md5sum" and "people who know how to set/read an arbitrary HTTP header" is fairly large. Hence my surprise at the common practice of ignoring this capability.)