Re: Comments on draft-vanrein-httpauth-sasl-08

[Rick van Rein <[e-mail]>]

Hello Hugo,

Thanks for studying the spec.

> Section 2.1 and 2.2 refer to the "c2c", "c2s", "s2s" and "s2c" fields. These
> are not "fields", they are *additional parameters* of the WWW-Authenticate
> header field (this is the nomenclature found in rfc7235 section-4.1). Calling
> them fields can be a bit confusing, especially during the first read and before
> reaching the examples in Section 4.

Yes, you are correct.  I shall change that in the draft.

> I'm not entirely sure if the intended use of the User header is fully clear,
> nor how User Agents are expected to determine a value for it. Perhaps it is
> best to further elaborate on this?

Thanks, 1st-time reader input is really useful.  It works just like the Host:
header, in fact, and selects server-side resources.  The text is a bit generic
perhaps, will look to rephrase it.

This is a protocol spec, and should avoid pinning down anything to a user
agent that is not needed for interoperability, so this is not easy.

> Those minor comments aside, I do find this specification quite useful and would
> like to voice my support of the proposal. In particular, HTTP with SASL would
> be of much use for CalDAV (rfc4791) and CardDAV (rfc6352). Currently it is
> possible to use email (IMAP and SMTP) with SASL (and therefore, SASL+OAUTH),
> but there is no standard mechanism to use SASL for address books and calendars.
> It seems quite clear to me that this specification has a very useful impact in
> the WebDav space in general.

Thank you very much; that is a perfect example of the general idea behind the
spec, to amalgamate authentication across protocols.  I had not thought of
Calendaring/Cards, but indeed: they work over generic carrier protocols.

Cheers,
 -Rick