[Web-SIG] Inviting feedback on my proposed "ASGI" spec

[Cory Benfield]

> On 10 Mar 2016, at 18:36, Andrew Godwin <andrew at aeracode.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> Second, if it were me I’d remove the `status_text` field on the `Response` object. Custom status text is a terrible misfeature (especially as HTTP/2 doesn’t support it), and in 99% of cases you’re just wasting data by repeatedly sending the default phrase that the server already knows.
> 
> Well, it IS optional; you only need to send it if you're changing it from the default or providing an unusual new value (e.g. 418). We could change the spec to say servers don't have to abide by it, too. I have done a project in the past with custom reason phrases, that's all :)

You monster! ;)

For what it’s worth, I object to the use of reason phrases because, as with all things in HTTP, they were far-too-broadly specified. The rules for parsing the reason phrase are super broad (the reason phrase allows \t, space, and then all bytes from 0x21 to 0xFF *excluding* 0x7F (ASCII DEL). This means that it’s sometimes possible to encode a reason phrase containing non-ASCII/non-Latin-1 codepoints in UTF-8 (I’ve seen this happen), and then everything gets really terrible really fast.

IMO, I think almost nothing would be lost by just quietly removing it from the specification. The only loss is in setting “unusual” values, and FWIW I think that’s *also* unwise: if it can’t be found here[0] then the unusual status code is nothing but vanity, because it’s no more precise than the X00 version that already exists (no user agent can take action on it).

Again, just my 2¢.

Cory


[0]: https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status-codes/http-status-codes.xhtml
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