Re: MIME and Warning header syntax

> The syntax for the Warning response-header, in the case of a character
> set different from ISO-8859-1, conflicts with RFC 1522 as clarified 
> by draft-ietf-822ext-mime-hdrs-00.txt.  If HTTP/1.1 is meant to allow
> encoded-words in a quoted-string, this should be clearly identified
> as a deviation from the rules in RFC 1522 and its successor.

Unless otherwise specified, HTTP is defined by the HTTP specification
(which has its own BNF for quoted-string) and not by RFC 1522, primarily
because of the moving target of MIME and policy differences with RFC 1522.
Nevertheless, I did try to avoid inconsistencies.

So, the answer to your question is that either draft-ietf-822ext-mime-hdrs-00
should change to avoid overspecifying the protocol (what it is doing in
the bit you included, since quoted-string will be interpreted by
the field value parser (as opposed to the message parser) and thus is
indeed capable of consisting of encoded-words), or to change
http-v11-spec-05 such that it defines both quoted-string and quoted-text,
with the former reverting to the old MIME definition.

My preference is to avoid overspecifying MIME, but Ned may have a better
idea about why such a restriction was considered necessary in the first
place.


 ...Roy T. Fielding
    Department of Information & Computer Science    (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
    University of California, Irvine, CA 92717-3425    fax:+1(714)824-4056
    http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/

Received on Wednesday, 3 July 1996 13:23:18 UTC