- From: Alexey Melnikov <alexey.melnikov@isode.com>
- Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 10:39:46 +0100
- To: "Manger, James H" <James.H.Manger@team.telstra.com>
- CC: "ietf-http-wg@w3.org" <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
On 18/07/2012 08:27, Manger, James H wrote: > HTTPbis part 7 (Authentication) introduces a new piece of ABNF labelled "b64token" [http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p7-auth-20#section-2.1]. It is also referenced/repeated in the OAuth2 Bearer draft spec. The new ABNF is necessary and explained quite clearly in the spec. However, the "b64token" label has already led at least a handful of people to mistakenly assume it always holds a base64-encoding. The examples in the OAuth2 Bearer spec were even changed so they were not base64-encodings to try to minimise the misunderstanding, but others have still made the mistaken assumption. > > How about renaming the ABNF production to "token68"? > > This label reflects the fact that it supports an alphabet of 68 characters (plus equal signs at the end). > > The new text in part 7 would become: > > token68 = 1*( ALPHA / DIGIT / > "-" / "." / "_" / "~" / "+" / "/" ) *"=" > > The "token68" syntax allows the 66 unreserved URI characters > ([RFC3986]), plus a few others, so that it can hold a base64, > base64url (URL and filename safe alphabet), base32, or base16 (hex) > encoding, with or without padding, but excluding whitespace > ([RFC4648]). I like that.
Received on Wednesday, 18 July 2012 09:40:15 UTC