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

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

--On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 10:02 -0500 John R Levine
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Feb 2020, John C Klensin wrote:
> 
>> Executive summary for Murray and any current ART ADs who have
>> not been following the I18N Directorate (i18ndir) list:
>> Martin Dürst posted a suggestion to the list several days
>> ago that suggested we take a careful look at
>> draft-ietf-httpbis-header-structure-15.  The request has led
>> to a lively discussion among John Levine, Patrik Fältström
>> and myself, during which I, at least, have learned a great
>> deal especially about how difficult it is to find just the
>> right language and terminology to talk about these areas even
>> among experts with decades of experience working together on
>> them. This note is, I hope, at or near the end of the thread
>> rather than at the beginning or middle and ends with a few
>> paragraphs of draft recommendations to you as ADs.   You can
>> probably skip over the rest of it and the earlier entries in
>> the thread unless you are interested in either how we got her
>> or a deeper understanding of the issues.
> 
> One other point worth mentioning: we are not asking them to
> invent new stuff.  For example, this draft has base64 encoded
> i18n text which needs a tag for the encoding.  MIME already
> does that, they can reuse the same syntax.

Not only does MIME do that and specify a syntax, but one of the
things I noticed (and that was mentioned later in the note) is
that there is already a Standards Track specification for doing
exactly that in HTTP, specifically by including adapting the
MIME encoded word form.  See RFC 8187 and note that this spec
seems to be unaware of its existence despite, presumably, coming
out of the same WG.  

I hope no one was offended by my use of the term "adult
supervision" in that context but when a WG appears to be unaware
of existing standards track specifications that appear to fall
precisely within the same narrow area of work (HTTP header
fields in this case) and contradicts them, we move, IMO, out of
the area of technical problems and into the area of management
ones.

    john


    john