Note of pain:

[haggholm]

HTTP 1.1, as per RFC 2616, supports no less than three ways of specifying the length of the response to a simple GET request:

• In a Content-Length header, as in HTTP 1.0;
• By means of the header Connection: close, which means content follows and ends only when we close the connection on you;
• By means of the header Transfer-Encoding: chunked, which means that the message is transferred in chunks, each of which begins with a chunk size—in hex, unlike the decimal representation of Content-Length—and ends with good old CRLFCRLF.

I do not know why this is so, but it annoys me, particularly as it turns out that some servers will ignore you if you specify, in your GET request, HTTP version 1.0 (I'm looking at you, Slashdot—as the first example I came across).