Re: Character encodings in headers [i74][was: Straw-man charter for http-bis]

At 17:55 07/08/20, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>The (potential) problem is that an intermediary (for example) needs  
>to be able to handle headers that it doesn't understand. If it's been  
>built to store headers as iso-8859-1 strings as they pass through (a  
>reasonable assumption, considering 2616), an unknown header with  
>another encoding -- no matter how specified or flagged -- may break it.

I think you present a valid scenario. However, storing headers as
iso-8859-1 essentially means storing (and resending) them as bytes.
If such an implementation gets UTF-8, it will just store and
resend that as iso-8859-1, which means store and resend as bytes,
which, from the viewpoint of that implementation, will be GIGO,
but overall, will not cause any damage.


Regards,    Martin.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp     

Received on Monday, 20 August 2007 09:20:35 UTC