[erik_seaberg]

This comes down to Postel's Law; they recommend liberally receiving what you conservatively cannot send. Also from RFC 2616 but not cited by the author:

> This flexibility regarding line breaks applies only to text media in the entity-body; a bare CR or LF MUST NOT be substituted for CRLF within any of the HTTP control structures (such as header fields and multipart boundaries).

They aren't going to allow sending LF until at least one bump to a higher protocol version where every server MUST accept it.