Open basti1302 opened 1 week ago
Copying this comment from @yurishkuro on the other issue here:
Hold on - the spec absolutely must mandate encoding, otherwise the consumer never knows how to interpret the data, whether to decode it or not. We had this ambiguity in jaeger baggage format and it was very painful to handle
We currently have this for "values" of list members:
It might be better to simply mandate the set of allowed characters, but not prescribe any particular process for encoding or decoding characters outside of the allowed set. For reference, the Cookie-/Set-Cookie-Spec only describes the allowed characters and does not mandate a requirement for any particular encoding, though it mentions that servers that want to store arbitrary data SHOULD encode them in some way.
There is little value in mandating a specific encoding for the following reasons: Parties that want to interact with each other via baggage need to agree on the baggage key any way, hence they can also agree on a encoding outside of baggage-octet, should that be required.
There is however value in having the spec mandating only the things that actually need to be standardized.
The main questions for this change are:
For context, this discussion about came up when discussing https://github.com/w3c/baggage/issues/138#issuecomment-2399014788 in the working group meeting.