Subject: feedback on draft-reschke-basicauth-enc-04, "3. The 'encoding' auth-param"

From: "Alexei Khlebnikov" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:20:43 +0100

Hi,

My feedback on  
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-basicauth-enc-04.html#encoding>:

Was it considered to name the new parameter "charset" instead of  
"encoding"?

I can see the following advantages of "charset":

1) "Charset" is unambigous. "Encoding" is ambigous, it can refer to many  
things: base64, quoted-printable, chunked-coding, gzip-compression, etc.

2) "Charset" is already used in the HTTP protocol, so it is good to use  
the same word for consistency:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

-- 
Alexei.

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From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:17:08 +0100

>Was it considered to name the new parameter "charset" instead of  

Well, "we" are trying to http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/#C020 move away
from using the "charset" term and there are not many alternative words
to choose from if you want to use an established term.

>things: base64, quoted-printable, chunked-coding, gzip-compression, etc.

That is probably largely thanks to language hygiene efforts like above,
it used to be rather unclear what people meant when they said "charset"
or "character set". Maybe we can declare success and use it, at least
where it's consistent with existing usage, but expect complaints.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:[email-masked] · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:28:09 +0100

> Was it considered to name the new parameter "charset" instead of

No, I didn't think of that.

> things: base64, quoted-printable, chunked-coding, gzip-compression, etc.

Well, as Björn says, charset is is ambiguous as well; the correct term 
here would be "character encoding scheme", but there's also the aspect 
of brevity.

> Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

I'd agree if this was exactly the same use case...

That being said, I'm happy to do what the majority thinks is best.

Best regards, Julian