Re: text/* types and charset defaults

On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 04:45:19PM +0100, Frank Ellermann wrote:
> >  HTTP relaxes this requirement and allows the transport of
> >  text media with plain CR or LF alone representing a line 
> >  break when it is done consistently for an entire entity-body.
> I wonder why HTTP cares about lineends in text media types,
> it has no line buffer with 1000 characters like SMTP.  HTTP
> only needs to spot the begin and the end of the body, or the
> similar task for chunks where that's used.
> >  HTTP applications MUST accept CRLF, bare CR, and bare LF as
> >  being representative of a line break in text media received
> >  via HTTP.
> Why should HTTP care at all about lineends in a body, it's not
> supposed to fix them into local lineends on the fly, or is it ?

At least one of the original motivations for HTTP's relaxed treatment
of end-of-line markers in text types was as a server optimization: 
so that servers could just send out the bytes in whatever was the 
local text format, _without_ having to convert or canonize the text.

(More sopisticated servers are free to do more, but this formulation
allowed a simpler server on various platforms.)

-- 
    Albert Lunde  albert-lunde@northwestern.edu
                  atlunde@panix.com  (new address for personal mail)
                  albert-lunde@nwu.edu (old address)

Received on Sunday, 20 January 2008 21:23:38 UTC