19.7.1 Compatibility with HTTP/1.0 Persistent Connections
Some clients and servers may wish to be compatible with some previous
implementations of persistent connections in HTTP/1.0 clients and
servers. Persistent connections in HTTP/1.0 must be explicitly
negotiated as they are not the default behavior. HTTP/1.0
experimental implementations of persistent connections are faulty,
and the new facilities in HTTP/1.1 are designed to rectify these
problems. The problem was that some existing 1.0 clients may be
sending Keep-Alive to a proxy server that doesn't understand
Connection, which would then erroneously forward it to the next
inbound server, which would establish the Keep-Alive connection and
result in a hung HTTP/1.0 proxy waiting for the close on the
response. The result is that HTTP/1.0 clients must be prevented from
using Keep-Alive when talking to proxies.
19.7.1 Compatibility with HTTP/1.0 Persistent Connections