Re: WGLC: draft-ietf-appsawg-http-forwarded-02.txt - section 5.1

[Willy Tarreau <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 12:15:02PM +0100, John Sullivan wrote:
> Julian Reschke wrote:
> > The HTTP community has been inventing new microsyntaxes for many years, 
> > and as far as I can tell, most header field parsers out there are broken 
> > beyond belief. We need less of them, even if this means that a few edge 
> > cases will be more verbose than necessary.
> 
> This. Each new syntax risks getting it wrong (even if in this case
> it ought to be fairly safe) - just look at the horrible horrible
> mess that is the history of Set-Cookie.
> 
> In addition to the headers I pointed out yesterday that use
> close variations on the theme, the definition of Expect appears
> to be almost *exactly* this syntax - except that it makes the
> value part ( "=" ( token / quoted-string ) ) optional. This allows
> for the sending of value-less flags without having to use the
> somewhat grotty flag="" construct. Perhaps adopting that syntax
> verbatim would be a good idea?

I too think so, it can be useful for boolean attributes (eg: 'secure'
instead of 'secure="yes"' or things like this).
 
Regards,
Willy