- From: Chris Newman <Chris.Newman@innosoft.com>
- Date: Mon, 21 Sep 1998 16:13:44 +0100 (BST)
- To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Cc: http-wg@hplb.hpl.hp.com
On Mon, 21 Sep 1998, Larry Masinter wrote: > The problem is that UTF-8 doesn't quite have a well-defined > 'canonical' form yet, either, although one is being developed, the > canonicalization algorithm won't be at "draft standard". So you might > have two browsers that would enter the same user name with different > UTF-8 encodings, too. Good point. In fact, the UTF-8 spec itself is still proposed, so the HTTP spec can't reference it normatively. > And we're not normally requiring clients to implement UTF-8 > transformations of user type-in at all so this will be a big problem. Fair enough. > On the other hand, it seems inappropriate to restrict user *names* to > US-ASCII. I wonder if we could change the BNF and description text > from "user name" and "username" to "user id", even if we leave > > username = "username" "=" user-id How about we restrict user-ids and typed-in passwords to US-ASCII for now, declare encoding of non-ASCII characters in those fields undefined but explicitly forbid use of localized charsets (e.g., ISO-8859-1)? Then we can amend it to use UTF-8 later with a spec that progresses separately on the standards track. - Chris
Received on Monday, 21 September 1998 08:13:22 UTC