Subject: [httpwg/http-extensions] Strings, Identifiers and Items (#505)

From: HTTP issue updates <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2018 23:30:12 +0000 (UTC)

We've designed structured headers so that it's easy to deterministically parse a given header into the appropriate data types. 

However, it seems like there's likely to be ambiguity about taking a given data structure in common programming languages and creating the correct data types, without a significant amount of metatdata.

While most languages can distinguish floats from integers, as well as binary content from other content, identifiers are a strict subset of strings.

For example, if a value is "foo",  and I need to serialise it as an Item, I have no idea whether it should be:

> ExampleHeader: foo

or 

> ExampleHeader: "foo"

without extra metadata. Same problem where items can appear inside lists, dict values, etc.

One way to address this would be to remove identifiers from items.

Thoughts?

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