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Re: Character encodings in headers [i74][was: Straw-man charter for http-bis]

Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp> Mon, 20 August 2007 09:20 UTC

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Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 18:18:30 +0900
To: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>, John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com>
From: Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
Subject: Re: Character encodings in headers [i74][was: Straw-man charter for http-bis]
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At 17:55 07/08/20, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>The (potential) problem is that an intermediary (for example) needs  
>to be able to handle headers that it doesn't understand. If it's been  
>built to store headers as iso-8859-1 strings as they pass through (a  
>reasonable assumption, considering 2616), an unknown header with  
>another encoding -- no matter how specified or flagged -- may break it.

I think you present a valid scenario. However, storing headers as
iso-8859-1 essentially means storing (and resending) them as bytes.
If such an implementation gets UTF-8, it will just store and
resend that as iso-8859-1, which means store and resend as bytes,
which, from the viewpoint of that implementation, will be GIGO,
but overall, will not cause any damage.


Regards,    Martin.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp

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