Re: [xhr] statusText is underdefined

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 4:17 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:

> On 3/27/12 2:46 PM, Glenn Adams wrote:
>
>> Is this really a problem?
>>
>
> Yes.  We've run into bug reports in the past of sites sending some pretty
> random bytes in the HTTP status text, then reading .statusText from script.
>  If we want interop here, we need to define the conversion.
>
>
>  HTTP defines the form and encoding of the status text
>>
>
> Except it doesn't, last I checked.  Has that changed?


RFC2616 states (on pages :

Fielding, et al. Standards Track [Page 39]


   Status-Line = HTTP-Version SP Status-Code SP Reason-Phrase CRLF

Fielding, et al. Standards Track [Page 40]

   Reason-Phrase  = *<TEXT, excluding CR, LF>

Fielding, et al. Standards Track [Page 15]


   The TEXT rule is only used for descriptive field contents and values
   that are not intended to be interpreted by the message parser. Words
   of *TEXT MAY contain characters from character sets other than ISO-
   8859-1 [22] only when encoded according to the rules of RFC 2047
   [14].

       TEXT           = <any OCTET except CTLs,
                        but including LWS>


This makes it pretty clear that Reason Phrase must use ISO-8859-1 (Latin1)
unless it uses the encoded-word extension from RFC2047. If the latter is
used, then a charset must be designated.

Given this, I don't see any spec bug (though there may be implementation
bugs in case the client side does not correctly implement the above HTTP
requirements).