Re: character encoding in header fields, was: SPDY Header Frames

On 2012-07-17 16:48, James M Snell wrote:
> Tunneling 1.1 traffic via 2.0 would likely be the easy part; it's the

Not even that. Given an HTTP/1.1 message containing non-ASCII octets in 
header field value, you simply don't know what unicode characters to map 
them to.

This is not theoretical; some UAs process UTF-8 in Content-Disposition, 
some use the installation's locale character set.

Yes, this is a mess, but it's not clear to me how to break out of it 
without breaking *some* setups that currently "work".

> ...
> The one thing we need to determine is: how critical is the ability to
> support seamless down-level conversion from 2.0 to 1.1 within a request?
> Is it acceptable for us to say that while 2.0 can be used to transport
> 1.1 messages, the reverse is not possible.
> ...

So how do you transport a 1.1 message inside 2.0 if it contains 
non-ASCII? Treat the header field value as binary?

Best regards, Julian

Received on Tuesday, 17 July 2012 15:00:21 UTC