header parsing, treatment of leading and trailing OWS

[julian.reschke@…]

in draft 07 part 1 we used to say:

"The field value MAY be preceded by optional whitespace; a single SP is preferred. The field-value does not include any leading or trailing white space: OWS occurring before the first non-whitespace character of the field-value or after the last non-whitespace character of the field-value is ignored and MAY be removed without changing the meaning of the header field." -- <​http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging-07.html#rfc.section.4.2.p.4>

In draft 08, the last 'MAY' became a 'SHOULD', which makes it read

"A field value MAY be preceded by optional whitespace (OWS); a single SP is preferred. The field value does not include any leading or trailing white space: OWS occurring before the first non-whitespace character of the field value or after the last non-whitespace character of the field value is ignored and SHOULD be removed without changing the meaning of the header field." (​http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging-08.html#rfc.section.3.2.p.4)

I think what we really should say is that they MAY be removed before passing the field-value to a specific header parser, thus definitions of headers MUST NOT make the presence of trailing/leading whitespace semantically significant.

[julian.reschke@…]

From [748]:

clarify the text about removal of leading/trailing OWS in header fields (see #201)

[julian.reschke@…]

Fixed in -09, pending review.

[julian.reschke@…]

This was fixed in -09, the ticket should be closed.