Re: draft-reschke-rfc2231-in-http: section 4.2, Error Handling

[Thomas Roessler <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 5:04 PM, Julian Reschke <[e-mail]> wrote:

>> Leaving the choice of precedence to the header specification implies
>> that parsers need to special-case. It would seem reasonable to make a
>> choice in this specification that for properties which can only occur
>> once, the traditional syntax takes precedence.
>
> That would rule out the use case where the traditional syntax is used as a
> fallback for clients that do not support the new syntax, as discussed in
> that section:
>
> "Header specifications that include parameters should also specify whether
> same-named parameters can occur multiple times. If repetitions are not
> allowed (and this is believed to be the common case), the specification
> should state whether regular or the extended syntax takes precedence. In the
> latter case, this could be used by producers to use both formats without
> breaking recipients that do not understand the syntax.

That's a compelling argument for choosing "new style takes precedence"
in the spec; I don't know of good arguments the other way.

My main point is that I think we should make a choice (and either of
the possible choices sounds reasonable), not which of the specific
choices it should be.