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

Besides entities, there is the pickle goal between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.

On Friday, August 3, 2012, Mike Belshe wrote:

> 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<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', '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.
>>>
>>>
>