IETF 80 - Content-Disposition

Julian Reschke, greenbytes

Problem Statement

• As of recent, there was no interop for non-ASCII filenames in Content-Disposition header fields. See http://greenbytes.de/tech/tc2231/ for the ugly details.
• There was confusion about who is defining what (RFC 2616 vs RFC 2183).
• RFC 2183 contains complicated options that do not make sense in HTTP.

Thus...

• Define in separate spec from the two above, clarifying I18N, removing options, fixing bugs.
• Approved <blink>2011-03-28</blink>.
• Firefox, Opera, and Konqueror did implement this for a long time.
• Chrome 9 and IE 9 followed since IETF LC.
• Only one major UA left (just saying).

Why six months between IETF LC and now?

• Some UA vendors wanted to discuss error handling.
• Turns out that in this case, error handling was inconsistent.

Next steps

• Reference from HTTPbis specs?
• Advance to Draft Standard soon?