Note: Client tolerance of bad servers
Servers not implementing the specification as written are not HTTP compiant. Servers should always be made completely copmpliant. However, clients should also tolerate deviant servers where possible.
Back compatibility
In order that clients using the HTTP protocol should be able to communicate with servers using the protocol originally implemented in the W3 data model, clients should tolerate responses which do not start with a numeric version number and response codes.
In this case, they should assume that the rest of the response is a document body in type text/html.
White space
Clients should be tolerant in parsing response status lines, in particular they should accept any sequence of white space (SP and TAB) characters between fields.
Lines should be regarded as terminated by the Line Feed, and the preceeding Carriage Return character ignored.