Subject: RE: ;binary

From: "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 23:27:20 -0800

At 06:50 PM 2002-02-21, Christopher Oliva wrote:
>There is sufficient grounds to say that servers should be allowed to return binary encodings if a client makes a request without ";binary".

The problem with this is that if a server is allowed to
return ;binary when the client makes a request without
;binary then the servers might actually do that.  That
would be bad as client wouldn't get what they asked for.

The solution is simple, a client gets what they ask for.
If they ask for "foo", they get "foo".  If they ask for
"foo;binary", they get "foo;binary".  While RFC 2251
did say "foo;binary" is to be treated as a subtype as
"foo", it also said clients MUST NOT expect
"foo;binary" when "foo" was requested.

The approach specified in -06 lets the MUST NOT trump
the "is to be treated as" statement.  This leads to a
specification would addresses the ambiguity while not
break existing LDAPv3 compliant implementations.

Kurt