Hi Bjoern,
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.
The original definition of this authentication scheme failed to
specify the character encoding scheme used to convert the user-pass
into an octet sequence.
I think it would be more appropriate to say that it did not do so. That
wasn't a particular "failure", sending unlabeled 8bit (and 7bit) content
was normal at the time, in part because other system parts also did not
know or care about character encodings.
I think the current text as specified is accurate, but I don't have a
strong opinion.
There should be an example for "no other authentication parameters are
defined -- unknown parameters MUST be ignored by recipients", otherwise
such extension points are too easily missed by implementers.