Re: [I18ndir] Fwd: Working Group Last Call: Structured Headers for HTTP

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

Martin,

Remembering that, at least in principle, the purpose of the
Directorate is just to advise the ART ADs, why not just send a
note to the WG list, during the WG LC, pointing out that, for a
document like this (and, as you point out, in this day and age),
they should either support a much broader range of characters of
include an Internationalization Considerations section that
explains why not. 

Because HTTP is not supposed to be visible to users, if the
Directorate is going to get involved, we will probably need to
have the usual discussion about protocol elements versus
user-visible strings, noting that one could easily have:

   Foo-Header: "Unicode in UTF-8 and NFKD"

Which is an all-ASCII description of a potentially non-ASCII
payload.  It seems to me that the fifth and six paragraphs of
that section (starting with "Unicode is not directly
supported...") address the issue in a clear way.  One can
disagree with the assertion there about causing interoperability
issues but that is a much more subtle and complex question than
"in this day and age".

Of course, in honor of the Rat Year and one of said rat's
favorite holes, we might then repeat the original IDNA argument
about UTF-8 discriminating against East Asian writing systems
and move toward a Bootstring-style encoding rather than
ASCII-encoded UTF-8.

And, FWIW, I am personally pleased to see that the draft is
using Base64 for byte sequences rather than %-encoded octets.    

best,
   john


--On Monday, 03 February, 2020 04:38 +0000 "Martin J. Dürst"
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> Dear I18N Directorate,
> 
> I think we should do a review of the draft below. In
> particular, I think  that in this day and age, something like
> "Strings are zero or more  printable ASCII [RFC0020]
> characters" is highly outdated. See
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-header-structur
> e-15#section-3.3.3  for details.
> 
> Regards,   Martin.
> 
> -------- Forwarded Message --------
> Subject: Working Group Last Call: Structured Headers for HTTP
> Resent-Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2020 17:11:30 +0000
> Resent-From: [e-mail]
> Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2020 09:11:20 -0800
> From: Tommy Pauly <[e-mail]>
> To: HTTP Working Group <[e-mail]>
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> The Structured Headers draft was updated yesterday, and Mark
> (as author)  let me know that the authors believe this is
> ready for last call. The  issues list is down to zero, so it's
> a good time for the working group  to take a careful
> read-through the document, and get it progressed!
> 
> This email starts a working group last call, which will end on
> Friday,  February 21. Please review the document and reply to
> the list with your  comments (or file an issue), and state
> whether you think this document  is ready for publication.
> 
> The current version of the document can be found here: 
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-header-structur
> e-15
> 
> Best,
> Tommy