Re: Issue 261: Check for requirements backing test cases, was: Comments on draft-ietf-httpbis-content-disp

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:
> On 02.11.2010 20:19, Adam Barth wrote:
>>> I like numbers. Can we *please* get numbers about actual use, and names
>>> of
>>> sites that use it?
>>
>> Feel free to gather that data.  I probably won't have time to gather
>> it anytime soon because I'm busy fixing color profile support for
>> images.
>
> I think it's up to the people who want to make the "nutty" encoding an
> Internet Standards Track document to provide this data.
>
>> I think it would be fine for this document to define a profile of the
>> filename parameter (and really the whole Content-Disposition header
>> field) for use by servers.  We'd say something like "if you want your
>
>> ...
>
> It does define a syntax for valid headers, and how to process them.
>
> Whether we call that a "profile" or not seems to make little difference.

The difference is this document purports to define the semantics of
the header field, but it does not.  It provides information that's
useful for generating the header field but not about how to consume
it.

Adam


>> The problem is that's not the document you've written.  You've written
>> a document that contains useful information for generating a
>> Content-Disposition header field.  However, the document doesn't
>> contain enough information about how to consume the header field.  If
>> I were to write a new user agent tomorrow, I'd need more information
>> than what's contained in this document.  Because no one's written that
>> down for me, I'll have to go reverse engineer some existing
>> implementations and make some guesses, which is the status quo that's
>> gotten us into the interoperability mess that we're in now.
>> ...
>
> This brings us back to the separate issue of whether we want specs to define
> handling of invalid data.
>
> This is already tracked separately (I think), so we should close this issue
> (#261).
>
> Best regards, Julian
>

Received on Tuesday, 2 November 2010 19:38:24 UTC