[Web-SIG] Inviting feedback on my proposed "ASGI" spec

[Cory Benfield]

> On 10 Mar 2016, at 23:56, Andrew Godwin <andrew at aeracode.org> wrote:
> 
> I would indeed want to require servers to always fold headers together into a comma-separated list, as that's what the RFC says, and it then means applications only have to deal with one kind of multi-header!

Wellllll….kinda?

The RFC says that multiple headers are *semantically equivalent* to the joined form, but does not in any sense require that it be done. (The normative language in RFC 7230 is MAY.)

I had this discussion recently with Brian Smith: while there is only one correct way to fold/unfold headers, anywhere on the spectrum between completely folded and completely unfolded is a perfectly valid representation of the HTTP header block. This means that there’s no *rules* about how a server is supposed to do it, at least from the IETF. ASGI is of course totally allowed to add its own rules, and requiring that they be folded is not terrible.

FWIW, in my experience, I’ve found that “list of tuples” is really the most likely to be correct way to represent a header block, because it provides some assurances to the user that the header block has not been aggressively transformed from how it was sent on the wire. While the *rules* are that the folded representation is supposed to be semantically equivalent to the unfolded representation, there is nonetheless some information implicit in those headers being separate.

My intuition when writing this kind of thing is to pass applications (like Django) the most meaningful representation I can, and then allow the application to make its own decisions about what meaning they’re willing to lose. That’s why I’d advocate for “list of two-tuples of bytestrings” as the representation. However, I don’t think there’s anything *wrong* with forcing the headers to be joined by the server where possible: it’s just not how I’d do it. ;)

> Set-cookie is the annoying thing here, though. That's why it's dict inbound and list of tuples outbound right now, and I just don't know if I want to make the inbound one a list of tuples too, given I do definitely want to force servers to concat headers together (unless I find any examples of that screwing things up)

You could make the inbound one a list of tuples but still require that the servers concat headers. The rule then would be that it needs to be possible for an application to say `dict(headers)` without any loss of meaning.

Cory
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