paramname in draft-reschke-basicauth-enc-04

On 2012-01-31 08:34, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
> ...
>>> to the name, `useUTF8` or `use-utf-8="yes" or some such would have been
>>> clearer).
>>
>> That's another good suggestion; we're not going to allow any other
>> encoding, so maybe making it a real flag is the best solution. What do
>> others think?
>
> I'm all in favor.
> ...

(tracked at 
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-basicauth-enc-issues.html#issue.paramname>)

So

   WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="foo", useUTF8

looks cute, but then there's

   auth-param     = token BWS "=" BWS ( token / quoted-string )

(<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-p7-auth-18.html#rfc.section.2.1>)

So it needs a value. We could say

   useUTF8="yes"

but then there's always the problem of remembering whether the syntax is 
"0"/"1", "false"/"true" or "no"/"yes".

We also could say that the presence of the parameter is sufficient, such 
as with

   useUTF8=""

but then people will be confused when useUTF8="false" does the same 
thing as for "true".

So overall, I think it's better to stick to

   encoding="value"

and hard-wire the value to "UTF-8". (I'm open to renaming the parameter 
to "enc" or "charset")

Feedback on both points appreciated; in doubt, I'll leave things as they 
are now.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Tuesday, 31 January 2012 21:19:19 UTC