> > I think the main question here would be deployability. The server is under
> control of the person who decides what to allow, and clients get eventually
> updated. But introducing restrictions like this might mean upgrading *users*.
>
> Yes. However, at the same time, the character set which is currently
> officially allowed on HTTP spec is ISO-8859-1 only, the ad-hoc handling of
> non-ISO-8859-1 characters on HTTP authentication at this moment
> is anyway not guaranteed to be interoperable.
> (And because of ad-hoc handling of non-ISO-8859-1 characters,
>  The latter half of ISO-8859-1 is also not well interoperable in reality.)
> 
> The HTTP community is going to adopt use of UTF-8 (with explicit
> flag for using that), and it will anyway break backward compatibility
> with non-ASCII usernames/passwords. (It will explicitly change
> encoding of non-ASCII, ISO-8859-1 characters.)

+1 on getting off of 8859-* being a good thing to do (IMHO).  Among other
items, I'd be concerned about non-ASCII characters being interpreted and
rendered in the wrong 8859 charset when the locale uses an 8859 charset
other than 8859-1.  At a minimum, Unicode doesn't have that problem ;-).

Thanks,
--David


> -----Original Message-----
> From: precis [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Yutaka OIWA
> Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2014 12:45 AM
> To: Martin J. Dürst
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [precis] usernames in PRECIS and http-auth
> 
> Hello Martin,
> 
> > I think the main question here would be deployability. The server is under
> control of the person who decides what to allow, and clients get eventually
> updated. But introducing restrictions like this might mean upgrading *users*.
> 
> Yes. However, at the same time, the character set which is currently
> officially allowed on HTTP spec is ISO-8859-1 only, the ad-hoc handling of
> non-ISO-8859-1 characters on HTTP authentication at this moment
> is anyway not guaranteed to be interoperable.
> (And because of ad-hoc handling of non-ISO-8859-1 characters,
>  The latter half of ISO-8859-1 is also not well interoperable in reality.)
> 
> The HTTP community is going to adopt use of UTF-8 (with explicit
> flag for using that), and it will anyway break backward compatibility
> with non-ASCII usernames/passwords. (It will explicitly change
> encoding of non-ASCII, ISO-8859-1 characters.)
> 
> It means that, at this moment, we CAN define the proper way of
> handling for non-ASCII UTF-8 strings (with possible smallest
> incompatibility with existing ad-hoc implementations),
> and it is the last possible moment to do that
> without severely breaking backward compatibility with
> spec-conformant implementations.
> 
> Of course, it should not break any compatibility with existing
> ASCII printable username/passwords.
> 
> 2014-10-26 12:36 GMT+09:00 "Martin J. Dürst" <[email protected]>:
> > Hello Peter,
> >
> > On 2014/10/23 11:38, Peter Saint-Andre - &yet wrote:
> >>
> >> [ Old thread alert! ]
> >>
> >> On 3/25/14, 12:52 AM, Yutaka OIWA wrote:
> >
> >
> >>> My answers to the Peter's questions:
> >>>
> >>>> "Y                     u            taka  O   i    w     a"
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Current HTTP allows it, and we don't need to reject that mostly.
> >>
> >>
> >> Does the HTTPAUTH WG want to support everything that HTTP currently
> >> supports, or is it open to restricting things a bit more?
> >
> >
> > I think the main question here would be deployability. The server is under
> > control of the person who decides what to allow, and clients get eventually
> > updated. But introducing restrictions like this might mean upgrading
> > *users*.
> >
> > Essentially, the server operator will have to mechanically check which user
> > names won't work anymore in the new protocol, and then contact these users
> > and ask them to change their user name or tell them that their user name was
> > modified. Not all users might like that.
> >
> >
> >> Has there been further discussion about this in the HTTPAUTH WG? I'm on
> >> that mailing list and I haven't seen much discussion on this topic.
> >
> >
> > Me neither.
> >
> >
> > Regards,   Martin.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> precis mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/precis
_______________________________________________
precis mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/precis

Reply via email to