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

Mark Nottingham wrote:
> E.g., a reasonable reading of the specification is that two ETags, one
> using RFC2047 encoding, and one not, are equal; I haven't checked, but
> I doubt that anyone has implemented this when they do comparison.

CherryPy implements that (since "opaque-tag = quoted-string"). Granted,
it's a small project, but when I implemented RFC2047 decoding, that was
the only "reasonable reading" I arrived at. I must have glossed over the
"octet equality" clause for ETag at the time. :/

> One way to fix both of these problems is to state that encoding is
> possible in specific use cases, rather than having a blanket statement
> about it in TEXT that is easily missed and not well-implemented.

Sounds reasonable. Perhaps the phrase "A string of text is parsed as a
single word if it is quoted using double-quote marks" needs some
elaboration as well.


Robert Brewer
fumanchu@aminus.org