Re: PROPOSAL: i74: Encoding for non-ASCII headers

On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 15:04 +0900, Martin Duerst wrote:

> I'd be glad to help with implementing. I'm just still not sure what
> you mean by "iso-8859-1 is implemented". After repeted calls for
> examples on this list, we have finally received a single example
> (Spanish with a wrong accent). And you have said yourself that
> HTTP mostly cares about the bytes, which means that in terms of
> actual implementations, it's 99.9% or so byte-in-byte-out, and
> maybe occasionally in some corner there is a tiny bit of iso-8859-1.

The only iso-8859-1 use that is interop dependent is in authentication I
think. But there MAY Be some interop charset dependencies in cookies as
well..

For pretty much any other header defined in RFC2616 or the common
extensions the charset used for the header is not really an issue as the
use is either constrained to US-ASCII, or descriptive text that no one
we know of looks at or displays other than for diagnostic purposes.
Parsing is generally done charset neutral based on "8-bit US-ASCII octet
strings", at least in the environments using US-ASCII as the base...

Regards
Henrik

Received on Saturday, 29 March 2008 23:39:08 UTC