Re: lower casing host names

On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 1:45 AM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com> wrote:
> 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.)

I suspect we'll eventually want to write a document that contains all
this "hidden knowledge."  I suspect HTTPbis will call that document a
"browser profile" of HTTP, which seems fine.  Not all of these
constraints apply in every situation in which HTTP is used.

Adam

Received on Saturday, 31 December 2011 18:20:41 UTC