> it's ASCII based (technically ISO-8859-1, which includes ASCII) No, it is (some) ASCII plus "opaque octets". ("A recipient SHOULD treat other octets in field

> it's ASCII based (technically ISO-8859-1, which includes ASCII) No, it is (some) ASCII plus "opaque octets". ("A recipient SHOULD treat other octets in field content (obs-text) as opaque data.") If you want to say that historically it was such, that's not correct either; it was that plus "supporting other charsets only through use of [RFC2047] encoding" which is a nightmare of an encoding scheme. > HTTP itself is mostly very simple, text "name: value" pairs separated by newlines Except when it isn't: headers can be folded across multiple lines. (Which is also obsolete, and discouraged.) Add to that 1xx responses, transfer encodings, chunks, chunk extensions, trailers. HTTP is far from "simple"…