Re: Delta Compression and UTF-8 Header Values

On Feb 8, 2013 11:50 AM, "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
[snip]
>
> I guess the relevant question then is: Are these headers where it
> is necessary for HTTP entities to understand the value (ie:
> "Cache-Control", "Location" etc, ) or headers which are just
> transported transparently from end to end ("X-FOObar", "Cookie"
> etc.)
>
> In the latter case, supporting UTF-8 is merely a matter of letting
> another bit through per byte, in the former case it opens a major
> bucket of worms IMO.
>

No argument there. However, this bucket of worms is no worse than several
of the others we've already been considering :)

The key headers where this becomes the most relevant are :host, :path,
Content-Disposition, Link, and possibly Cookie/Set-Cookie (that's a big
maybe).

If nothing else, it would be helpful to have a single encoding defined for
all non-ascii header field values that can be indicated by a bit flag. E.g.
if the flag is set, value is hex encoded binary. It doesn't alleviate all
the issues, of course, but  does simplify things for app developers.

> --
> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by
incompetence.