Re: #516 note about WWW-A parsing potentially misleading

* Julian Reschke wrote:
>Hi there,
>
><http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-p7-auth-24.html#rfc.section.4.4>:
>
>"User agents are advised to take special care in parsing the 
>WWW-Authenticate field value as it might contain more than one 
>challenge, or if more than one WWW-Authenticate header field is 
>provided, the contents of a challenge itself can contain a 
>comma-separated list of authentication parameters."
>
>This is text that we copied from RFC 2616 
>(<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2616.html#rfc.section.14.47>). 
>However, isn't the
>
>"...if more than one WWW-Authenticate header field is provided..."
>
>incorrect?
>
>What's contained in a challenge does not depend on the number of header 
>field instances, after all.

The intent may have been to emphasise that having only one challenge per
WWW-Authenticate header does not mean no special care has to be taken. I
agree that it can be confusing; replacing the sub clause by "and" should
be fine.

(User agents should also take special care handling multiple headers; it
can make a difference whether you parse them individually or merge them
first and then parse the whole value; e.g. two individually malformed
values might turn into a well-formed value. But WWW-Authenticate is not
special in that regard.)
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Wednesday, 30 October 2013 14:41:21 UTC