Structured Headers for HTTP
draft-ietf-httpbis-header-structure-14
HTTP M. Nottingham
Internet-Draft Fastly
Intended status: Standards Track P-H. Kamp
Expires: May 2, 2020 The Varnish Cache Project
October 30, 2019
Structured Headers for HTTP
draft-ietf-httpbis-header-structure-14
Abstract
This document describes a set of data types and associated algorithms
that are intended to make it easier and safer to define and handle
HTTP header fields. It is intended for use by specifications of new
HTTP header fields that wish to use a common syntax that is more
restrictive than traditional HTTP field values.
Note to Readers
_RFC EDITOR: please remove this section before publication_
Discussion of this draft takes place on the HTTP working group
mailing list (ietf-http-wg@w3.org), which is archived at
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/ [1].
Working Group information can be found at https://httpwg.github.io/
[2]; source code and issues list for this draft can be found at
https://github.com/httpwg/http-extensions/labels/header-structure
[3].
Tests for implementations are collected at https://github.com/httpwg/
structured-header-tests [4].
Implementations are tracked at https://github.com/httpwg/wiki/wiki/
Structured-Headers [5].
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1. Intentionally Strict Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2. Notational Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. Defining New Structured Headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Structured Data Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.1. Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.2. Dictionaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.3. Items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4. Working With Structured Headers in HTTP Headers . . . . . . . 13
4.1. Serializing Structured Headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4.2. Parsing Header Fields into Structured Headers . . . . . . 20
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
7.3. URIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Appendix A. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Appendix B. Frequently Asked Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
B.1. Why not JSON? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
B.2. Structured Headers don't "fit" my data. . . . . . . . . . 33
Appendix C. Implementation Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Appendix D. Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
D.1. Since draft-ietf-httpbis-header-structure-13 . . . . . . 34
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