Re: Draft finding - "Transitioning the Web to HTTPS"

On 2014/12/11 21:46, Henri Sivonen wrote:

> It seems to me that there is a pattern that people find the theory of
> forward proxies architecturally appealing and then try to find use
> cases that fit the architecture. The previous hobbyhorse of this kind
> was "transcoding proxies". No one had really seen one (*reverse*
> proxies and origin servers don't count) or had a personal need for one
> but they were believed to exist Over There in Russia and it was
> supposedly important to design protocols and formats to cater to them
> (even though the more reasonable protocol design choice was for
> everyone to use UTF-8 and not transcode anything--and even failing
> that, browsers have built-in support for a whole bunch of Cyrillic
> legacy encodings, so there is no need for intermediaries to transcode
> anyway). People making this argument weren't themselves from Russia,
> of course. Hence, "Over There".

I can confirm that transcoding proxies existed in Japan, but that was a 
long, long time ago (probably about 20 years). Of course UTF-8 is a much 
better choice. Transcoding proxies were never a preferred choice, just a 
necessary evil at some point in time.

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Friday, 12 December 2014 06:38:45 UTC