Re: paramname in draft-reschke-basicauth-enc-04

On 2012-02-04 08:13, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:58:07 +0100, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
> wrote:
>> * Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>> Other than XML, is there a precedent for using "encoding"? Most
>>> places use "charset" I think (HTTP, CSS, HTML).
>>
>> DOM Level 3 Core uses xmlEncoding and inputEncoding, XSLT uses output-
>> encoding, .NET uses System.Text.Encoding.*, Google search uses "ie" and
>> "oe" parameters indicating "encoding", ... It seems unlikely you could
>> make a sensible argument about usage (outside the context of HTTP
>> headers, which includes "HTML") to choose one over the other here.
>
> Well, CSS has @charset, and HTML has a charset attribute. And
> xmlEncoding and inputEncoding are on their way out. I think it would
> make more sense to keep using charset as a keyword.

One thing that bothers me more is potential confusion with specifying 
the charset of parameters in WWW-Authenticate.

People who do not read specs might read the following

   WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="something", charset="UTF-8"

as

   "something" is encoded in UTF-8.

Now there's not a lot we can do about people not reading specs, but how 
about:

   WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="something", accept-charset="UTF-8"

? (Stolen from 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#adef-accept-charset>)

Best regards, Julian

Received on Saturday, 4 February 2012 11:56:15 UTC