Re: FYI... Binary Optimized Header Encoding for SPDY

One of the charter requirements of HTTP/2, I thought, was interop to
HTTP/1.1 servers.

If so, how would we pass UTF8 headers to HTTP/1.1 servers?

If we can't then we don't need to support them, right?

Mike


On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 8:30 AM, Jonathan Ballard <dzonatas@gmail.com> wrote:

> ASCII is not "trivially UTF8." UTF8 lacks the available flow control of
> ASCII. Any conversion between ASCII and EBCDIC is best done in hardware. We
> already know the security issue of conversions from unicode to EBCDIC, and
> I doubt that is something we can scheme here on on-topic.
>
>
> On Friday, August 3, 2012, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
>
>> On 2012/08/02 17:27, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>>
>>> In message<
>>> CABaLYCv7U7iLBu5+8Nb9Wa1VeQguoMLJw4VOCbDBQK3WoE-sFg@mail.gmail.com>
>>> , Mike Belshe writes:
>>>
>>>  * I don't think we need utf-8 encoded headers.  Not sure how you'd pass
>>>>>>
>>>>> them off to HTTP anyway?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I just don't see any problem being solved by adding this?  If there is
>>>> no
>>>> benefit, we should not do it, right?
>>>>
>>>
>>> If this would solve any major problems inside a 20 year horizon, we
>>> should do it.
>>>
>>
>> It will solve quite a few problems, some of them major, maybe not for
>> HTTP itself, but for the applications on top. It will actually solve some
>> problems that have been around for at least the last 15 years.
>>
>> HTML and HTTP were created when the breakthrough of iso-8859-1 (Latin-1)
>> in Western Europe was predictable (the nascent Web helped to unify the
>> Western Europe 'national' 7-bit and 8-bit encodings quite a bit).
>>
>> At least as early as 1995 (RFC 2070) or 1996 (RFC 2130, RFC 2277), it was
>> clear to those concerned that Unicode and UTF-8 was the way of the future.
>> As everybody should be able to confirm when thinking about US-ASCII, using
>> a single character encoding (rather than e.g. ASCII and EBCDIC or some such
>> alternatively) brings HUGE benefits. The same is true when streamlining
>> from a zoo of character encodings to UTF-8.
>>
>> These days, over 60% of the Web is already in UTF-8, and if you add in
>> the 20% of pure ASCII which is trivially also UTF-8, it's 80%. All other
>> encodings are in serious decline. (see p. 52 of the July IEEE Spectrum).
>> And efforts such as HTML5 are strongly pushing to get more UTF-8. I think
>> lots of HTTP users would appreciate a better commitment from HTTP with
>> respect to character encoding in headers and the like. What's currently
>> there is really just a mess, and should be cleaned up.
>>
>>
>> Regards,    Martin.
>>
>>