Re: PROPOSAL: i74: Encoding for non-ASCII headers

On 04/04/2008, at 10:40 AM, Roy T. Fielding wrote:

> On Apr 3, 2008, at 3:58 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>>
>> Yes, that's one path we can take, but we need to make that decision.
>
> Not really.  I'll reiterate again -- it makes absolutely no sense
> whatsoever to be micromanaging the unused details of octet encoding
> when the specification parts that define that very thing are already
> on the hook to be removed/rewritten in accordance with the draft
> partitioning.

Roy, you often talk about things that will happen as part of the  
partitioning, but it's not clear what's involved. Do you have a  
roadmap of what you'd like to happen? If we're going to attempt  
substantial rewrites of different sections, we need to start that  
process soon.

Without some idea of that, it's going to be difficult to make any  
forward progress if we have to block any substantive issues on future  
rewrites that we may or may not do.

> The parsing algorithm will not say anything about C1 controls because
> no known implementation of HTTP checks for C1 controls.

That doesn't follow. If there are security or interoperability  
implications of C1 controls in text, it certainly deserves  
consideration. Also, while the message parsing machinery doesn't touch  
TEXT, there are other parts of implementations that do -- e.g.,  
command-line tools, Web forms for configuring servers and proxies,  
configuration files, and so forth. Just because it's payload doesn't  
mean that it doesn't have implementation impact.


--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Friday, 4 April 2008 00:04:50 UTC