[Web-SIG] WSGI and long response header values

[James Y Knight]

On Sep 8, 2006, at 7:22 PM, Robert Brewer wrote:
> Bah. I knew I forgot a constraint in there (the strings have to be  
> encoded by the app). Personally, I think the "separate-by-spaces"  
> cure is worse than the disease. I also finally found the only other  
> discussion of this issue [1] and ... I wish we had allowed folding  
> from the beginning. Given the obscure nature of this need, I would  
> rather have had all WSGI implementations be 99% WSGI-compliant (by  
> ignoring folding) than 99% HTTP-compliant (by not allowing  
> folding). We could have improved the former number without changing  
> the spec, but not the latter. Meh. Water under the bridge. Maybe in  
> 1.1?
I don't see what's wrong with encoding with the 75-char word-limit,  
separating "words" by spaces, *without* newlines. If the server feels  
like folding a long line into two, it can do so, but it's perfectly  
within its rights not to, and AFAIK nothing at all requires it to  
ever fold, given that a folded line is exactly equivalent to a single  
space. Line folding is one of those things that really has no purpose  
in HTTP besides to write out the examples in the RFCs.

James