Martin Duke's Discuss on draft-ietf-httpbis-header-structure-18: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Martin Duke via Datatracker <[e-mail]>]

Martin Duke has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-httpbis-header-structure-18: Discuss

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DISCUSS:
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This is probably a simple one, and perhaps I'm missing something obvious:

Throughout Section 3, the document specifies minimum data structure sizes (1024
list members, 256 inner list members, 64-character keys, etc.) that the
receiver MUST be able to process. What is the desired behavior if any of these
data structures exceeds what the receiver can process? Must it skip the entire
field, or can it process the first N entries and then ignore the rest? Given
the "Intentionally Strict Processing" principle, it would be good to spell this
out.


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COMMENT:
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Thanks for this noble attempt to tame the wildness that is the HTTP spec!

Comments:
- While this is by no means a required change to publish this document, I found
the order of Section 3 to be backwards from what would easiest to follow. The
higher-order concepts (e.g. lists) are defined first, and refer to low-level
concepts (like items) that are not defined till the end of the section.

Nits:
- In Sec 3.1.2, it might be useful to explain that in example-IntHeader, a is
TRUE.

- sec 3.2. Can you add some text to make it clear that the value in dictionary
entries is only optional (in brackets) because of Boolean TRUE? This was not
clear to me until I read sec. 4.1.2.

- Sec 4. s/before HPACK is applied/before compression with HPACK
(A receiver "applies" HPACK to decompress, and presumably before doing this
parsing)

- Sec 4.2. s/header value/field value