Re: [xml-dev] RE: Encoding charset of HTTP Basic Authentication

[Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>]

On 01/02/12 15:21, Michael Kay wrote:
> On 01/02/2012 14:44, Tei wrote:
>> On 1 February 2012 13:08, David Lee<dlee@calldei.com> wrote:
>> ...
>>> Encoding still is a hard problem but I can't accept that Ignorance
>>> was the
>>> cause of it missing from the HTTP specs.
>>>
>> Using ascii was a adecuate solution. Solved the problem at the time,
>> for the people that needed a solution. Maybe not for everyone forever,
>> but that can be solved by new protocols.
>>
> Well, for some of the people that needed a solution, anyway.
>
> More to the point, the Europeans were locked in debate over ideal
> standards like X.400 and ODA that solved every requirement under the
> sun, while the Americans just hacked together something that worked; and
> most of the Americans had never met anyone with an umlaut in their name.

The OSI stuff was truly a nightmare to implement. An object lesson in 
how not to construct a suite of protocols. Perhaps the sole legacies of 
X.500 are the ghastly mess that is AD internals, and the use of the word 
"distinguished" :-)

> Cheap and cheerful won the day, and we are all still paying the price.

"If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me"

:-)

///Peter