| Speaking as the other author, I agree. :-)
Deborah On Dec 14, 2006, at 4:39 PM, Mark Davis wrote: Speaking as one of the authors, I think it is clear that UTF-7 should only be supported where really necessary; only in environments that are not 8-bit clean. It was originally designed for email, but in this day and age, 8-bit clean email transport is really not much of an issue.
Mark
On 12/14/06, Misha Wolf <Misha.Wolf@reuters.com> wrote:
fyi
-----Original Message-----
From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of Roy T. Fielding
Sent: 14 December 2006 22:13
To: W3C TAG
Subject: ban the use and implementation of UTF-7
Over the years I have seen a number of security exploits that make
use of broken browsers that sniff character encodings in combination
with UTF-7 encoded tags or javascript commands. I have never actually
seen anyone use UTF-7 for anything legitimate (other than testing).
Is there some reason why WWW clients need to support UTF-7?
It seems completely unnecessary given the now ubiquitous use of 8-bit
clean transports and the presence of UTF-8, which IIRC was defined
long after UTF-7. However, the wider community may be aware of
some reason why browsers should support it, so I'd like to hear
your comments.
If there is no need for UTF-7, I'd like the TAG to consider it an
issue for the sake of asking browsers to remove its implementation
and banning its use by servers.
I know this won't solve any problems for deployed clients, and
wouldn't be an issue at all if servers used the same algorithm for
escaping characters that clients used to interpret them, but in the
long term it will simplify some checks for XSS attacks and I don't
think it will harm the Web. That is, unless there is some significant
body of content out there that is encoded as UTF-7.
Cheers,
Roy T. Fielding <http://roy.gbiv.com/>
Chief Scientist, Day Software < http://www.day.com/>
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