Re: NEW ISSUE: repeating non-list-type-headers

Julian Reschke wrote:
> Now this seems to be kind of backwards, wouldn't it be *much* clearer if 
> it said:
> 
>    Multiple message-header fields with the same field-name MUST NOT be
>    present in a message unless the entire field-value for that
>    header field is defined as a comma-separated list [i.e., #(values)].

It would be clearer, but it would clash with reality.  All web servers
and web clients use Set-Cookie, which is prohibited by that.

I think it's important to acknowledge that Set-Cookie is still around,
and all public web servers and clients must deal with it in practice
(if they support cookies).

> That being said, do we have a recommendation for recipients when that 
> requirement is violated? I would assume that servers SHOULD return a 400 
> (Bad Request), but what about clients?

An HTTP agent's implementation _ought_ to be able to parse the headers
into a name->value dictionary, concatenating any multiple values for
the same field-name with ", " between them, with the practical
exception of Set-Cookie, for which a list must be kept separately.

Some servers and clients are implemented like that, and they are fine.

The module responsible for parsing headers generally doesn't have a
list of the syntaxes of each header type, and such a list would be
difficult to obtain because of application-specific headers which may
be different for different resources on the same server.

Hence the open-endedness of the text you focused on in RFC 2616, I guess.

-- JAmie