ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [http-auth] Last Call: <draft-ietf-httpauth-basicauth-update-05.txt> (The 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme) to Proposed Standard

2015-02-06 09:36:00
* Alexey Melnikov wrote:
On 05/02/2015 22:49, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
 [snip]
    The realm value is an opaque string
    which can only be compared for equality with other realms on that
    server.

RFC 7235 says "The realm value is a string, generally assigned by the
origin server, that can have additional semantics specific to the
authentication scheme." This seems contradictory (perhaps the intent is
to say that for the particular case of Basic, the realm value is opaque
in contrast to other schemes where it might not be opaque, but that is
not clear from the text) and misleading (users make decisions based on
the string, which often contains human readable text, so it's not really
opaque to them).

I think it is opaque to clients and servers, so they shouldn't try to 
parse it.

A better phrase would be something like "free-form text".
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern(_at_)hoehrmann(_dot_)de · 
http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
 Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015)  · http://www.websitedev.de/ 

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>