Re: qvalue *

Julian Reschke wrote:

> It is a problem if it occurs in practice. Does it?

We both had this *;q=0.7 oddity with different UAs, that's
a practical case.  All HTTP servers we visit are forced to
interpret it _somehow_  Because I'm always curious I like
to know what they are supposed to do.

William's observation that they can have their own list of
priorities helps, but doesn't guarantee that you get UTF-8
in this scenario - the server might prefer BOCU-1 because
it needs less bandwidth.

Roberts proposal goes in a similar direction:  There are 
ways to deal with "*" in some appropriate way if it's the
winner (or one of the winners) determined by <qvalue>.

Ry's proposal would be nice, get rid of the <qvalue> and
use ordered lists.  But we're not supposed to change the
spec. so radically.

> Of course we can spend time on edge cases like these.

I don't insist on spending much time on it, I just want
it to be clear.  How about this:

| Note that "*" or similar wildcards depending on theare interpreted as



> 
> But if we do, I'd prefer to talk about repeating Content-Length or 
> Content-Type headers first, because those may have security implications.
> 
> As a matter of fact, we *did* discuss those a few months ago, and 
> decided not to include error handling instructions into the spec.
> 
> So why start here, without any evidence that we're working on a problem 
> that indeed affects people?
> 
> BR, Julian
> 
> 
>

Received on Monday, 4 August 2008 21:24:13 UTC