Re: Structured Headers: length limits

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 3:16 PM Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
> > You retain the hard upper limit on identifiers though.  Is that really
> > necessary?  Or is this to preserve interoperability somehow?

> I struggled with this; since it's used for dict and parameter names, it
seemed reasonable to be a bit more constraining here. Happy to open it up
if that causes discomfort.

Yeah, not sure if it needs action, but it stands out a little.  There's two
competing concerns, in my view.  If these identifiers are just implemented
as pointers to the receive buffer, there is no real cost in allowing longer
values.  The concerns about string encoding don't really apply given the
restrictive grammar you define.  On the other hand, it is helpful to have
some constraints on identifiers.  But perhaps the most effective constraint
we have is that people don't like insanely long identifiers for many other
reasons.

I'm leaning slightly toward removing the cap here too, and establishing a
lower expectation for minimum supported length (say 64 octets).

Received on Wednesday, 16 May 2018 00:41:19 UTC