Re: parameter quoting - LC comment on draft-nottingham-http-link-header-07.txt

Mike Burrows wrote:
> Hi Julian (and all),
> 
>     Which made have a closer look at existing parameters (sorry for not
>     bringing this up earlier):
> 
>                         | ( "type" "=" type-name "/" subtype-name )
> 
>     I believe this *definitively* needs quoting, as "/" is a separator
>     character in HTTP and thus can not appear in a token.
> 
> 
> But is 'type-name "/" subtype-name' a token?  I didn't interpret as such 
> - in fact I assumed (perhaps erroneously) that it was in fact two tokens 
> separated by "/".
> 
> Regards,
> Mike
> ...

You are right, it's not. But, in general, parameter values either take 
tokens or quoted-strings, so a generic parser of HTTP parameters would 
fail to parse this correctly.

Maybe that's not a big issue in practice, because people use custom 
parser per header field, but it would be good if we could avoid that.

Best regards, Julian