[Web-SIG] PEP 444 (aka Web3)
And Clover
and-py at doxdesk.com
Fri Sep 17 00:48:18 CEST 2010
On 09/16/2010 06:19 PM, Robert Brewer wrote:
> 2. Hardly anybody implements RFC 2047, and http-bis is phasing it out.
s/Hardly anybody/No-one/. Even if you wanted to, it's impossible to
implement in any consistent way. The mention of RFC2047 is nothing more
than an error.
RFC2047 is not on-topic as the top-level HTTP request/response entity is
not defined in RFC822-family terms (HTTP uses its own grammar which is
subtly incompatible). In header that might be able to fit an RFC2047
encoded-word, no browser or server actually supports it, and the one
place where RFC2616 actually references RFC2047 is in a quoted-string
context, which RFC2047 explicitly states is not a valid place to use it!
This is why httpbis wants rid of it, and why Web3 shouldn't mention
RFC2047 at all. There is no reliable mechanism today to get non-ASCII
characters into an HTTP header, browsers treat non-ASCII header values
differently and incompatibly, and all Web3 can hope to do is pass
through the bytes unchanged without regard to what encoding they might
represent.
> since folded and/or 2047-encoded lines are equivalent
> to their non-folded-nor-encoded variants, applications have no
> business emitting folded or encoded versions of these
Indeed. I'll go further: there is no place for header folding in HTTP,
period - neither from the application nor the server/gateway. This is
another feature httpbis deprecates. Folding is an RFC822-family trait
that doesn't work on the web, due to poor server/UA compatibility and
the existence of long, inherently non-foldable headers (eg. try passing
a Authorization header containing a Kerberos ticket in 80 columns).
--
And Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/
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