[Web-SIG] Re: Latest WSGI Draft (Phillip J. Eby)

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 07:37 PM 8/24/04 -0500, Ian Bicking wrote:
>Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>>Oops.  We both goofed: this should be:
>>     headers['content-encoding'] = ['gzip']
>
>Was there any resolution on how headers are going to work?  While it's 
>certainly more confusing to deal with a list of headers, as opposed to a 
>dictionary of headers, I feel like the whole thing is a little vague at 
>this point.
>
>Must all values be lists?  Other sequences?  Is it an error to put a 
>string there?  I fear I'd see a lot of:
>
>content-encoding: g
>content-encoding: z
>content-encoding: i
>content-encoding: p

I was thinking lists-only, so it's an error to use a string for *any* 
header.  If it's based on some kind of semantics, it's not easily extended, 
and if there's any mixed typing it increases the chances of messing it up.


>Must all keys be lower case?

Yes.


>   If not, headers aren't going to be any easier to work with as a 
> dictionary than as a list.  If they are required to be lower case, again 
> it seems like a fragile part of the spec.
>
>It all makes me think that it'd just be easier to write the four or so 
>functions to make lists of headers easy to deal with.

You could equally well write the functions to work on the dictionary of 
lists.  ;)

OTOH, I think it's probably best if the spec is strengthened to, "the 
server *must* report an immediate error if any of the header keys contain 
non-lowercase letters, or if any values are not lists."  That would help 
flush out any programming errors.