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:a...@doxdesk.com http://www.doxdesk.com/ _______________________________________________ Web-SIG mailing list Web-SIG@python.org Web SIG: http://www.python.org/sigs/web-sig Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/web-sig/archive%40mail-archive.com
