Re: HTTP/2 Header Encoding Status Update

On 2013-02-28 00:00, James M Snell wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 2:45 PM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
>> Hi James,
>>
>> [snip]
>> So, the biggest concern here, I think, is that the conversion of a UTF-8 value to ASCII/Latin-1 -- to be able to forward the header on a HTTP/1.x hop -- requires knowledge of the header.
>>
>> Would you want to define a standard way to encode UTF-8 in Latin-1 (e.g., percent-encoding) for headers that use this? It would constrain the headers (and likely rule out any existing headers from using UTF-8), but I don't see how this is going to be viable otherwise.
>>
>
> Yes, I think that is reasonable. One key thing is that existing
> headers would need to be explicitly redefined to take advantage of the
> new encoding options so it would be technically invalid to take any of
> the existing headers and encode them as UTF-8 unless their definition
> has been changed in spec. That said, a standard mapping like you
> suggest would be good in the cases we do have to drop down from http/2
> to /1. Percent-encoding seems to be perfectly reasonable.
> ...

That's not going to work for existing header fields and existing code on 
HTTP/1.1.

This is a hairy problem. If it wasn't, we would already have solved it.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Thursday, 28 February 2013 07:27:39 UTC