- From: Misha Wolf <Misha.Wolf@reuters.com>
- Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 22:18:02 +0000
- To: www-international@w3.org, ietf-charsets@iana.org
fyi -----Original Message----- From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Roy T. Fielding Sent: 14 December 2006 22:13 To: W3C TAG Subject: ban the use and implementation of UTF-7 Over the years I have seen a number of security exploits that make use of broken browsers that sniff character encodings in combination with UTF-7 encoded tags or javascript commands. I have never actually seen anyone use UTF-7 for anything legitimate (other than testing). Is there some reason why WWW clients need to support UTF-7? It seems completely unnecessary given the now ubiquitous use of 8-bit clean transports and the presence of UTF-8, which IIRC was defined long after UTF-7. However, the wider community may be aware of some reason why browsers should support it, so I'd like to hear your comments. If there is no need for UTF-7, I'd like the TAG to consider it an issue for the sake of asking browsers to remove its implementation and banning its use by servers. I know this won't solve any problems for deployed clients, and wouldn't be an issue at all if servers used the same algorithm for escaping characters that clients used to interpret them, but in the long term it will simplify some checks for XSS attacks and I don't think it will harm the Web. That is, unless there is some significant body of content out there that is encoded as UTF-7. Cheers, Roy T. Fielding <http://roy.gbiv.com/> Chief Scientist, Day Software <http://www.day.com/> This email was sent to you by Reuters, the global news and information company. To find out more about Reuters visit www.about.reuters.com Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of Reuters Ltd.
Received on Thursday, 14 December 2006 22:18:26 UTC