- From: Roy Fielding <fielding@beach.w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 1995 16:50:36 -0400
- To: Lou Montulli <montulli@mozilla.com>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
>Are you sure it will break MacHTTP and WebSTAR, or do you just assume it
>will? If it does, these servers are not following the spec. HTTP
>headers are MIME headers, and MIME headers can always be followed by
>a semi-colon and additional attributes.
Er, well, no, that is only true of headers which contain
*(";" parameter)
as part of the definition. Each known header's field value is defined
according to the specific BNF for that header -- the generic header parsing
BNF only applies when the header name is unknown or when the parser
is not looking inside the field value.
However, it is a good rule to follow for robust implementations,
and we are not talking about a change to HTTP/1.0, but rather HTTP/1.1,
where we are able to change specific header-parsing within reason.
....Roy T. Fielding Department of ICS, University of California, Irvine USA
Visiting Scholar, MIT/LCS + World-Wide Web Consortium
(fielding@w3.org) (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
Received on Tuesday, 15 August 1995 14:07:29 UTC