Re: lower casing host names

On Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:27:44 +0100, Daniel Stenberg <daniel@haxx.se> wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Dec 2011, Adam Barth wrote:
>
>> I suspect it's not really something for HTTPbis to concern itself with,  
>> however.
>
> I am concerned because when the three most used browsers do this it  
> means lots of people will test their sites and servers with them and  
> everything will be fine and dandy even when they lazily don't do the  
> right thing - and this will force other HTTP implementors to go this way  
> too sooner or later. Pretty much exactly how we ended up with how  
> cookies work.
>
> These three browsers then apparently do something with HTTP that isn't  
> mentioned (or referred to) in httpbis. Such hidden knowledge isn't good  
> for a protocol spec imho.

You can (and I think we have) run into the same kind of issues with order  
of HTTP headers, HTTP header casing, etc. HTTP isn't very conservative in  
what clients have to do, while it probably should be given that there are  
only so many clients versus many many servers. Although not protocols, we  
learned the same lessons with e.g. CSS, the DOM, and HTML. (Also known as  
Postel's law.)


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Saturday, 31 December 2011 09:46:27 UTC