bug#16220: url-http.el: Not conforming to HTTP spec

[Jarosław Rzeszótko]

Hi,

2014/1/5 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>:
> This summer, I started rewriting url-retrieve and friends in the way
> that was discussed on emacs-devel a ... couple years back:
>
> (with-url "http://fsf.org"; :timeout 10
>                            :concurrency 5
>                            :request-method "POST"
>                            :headers '(("Foo" . "Bar"))
>   (message "The result was: %s" (buffer-string)))
>
> but I kinda stopped before I really got started, because I couldn't
> figure out how to make this work in the non-lexical binding case.  And
> having this work only with lexical binding seemed kinda meh.
>
> You wouldn't happen to have any ideas in that area?  >"?

I think a natural way of representing the request if this was to be
designed today would be to use alists all the way, perhaps with
optional arguments for adjusting how precisely the request itself
should be sent and handled:

(http "http://www.fsf.org/xyz/zyx";
        '((method . "GET")
          (path . "/")
          (headers . (("Accept-Encoding" . "UTF-8")))
          (form . (("param1" . "value1"))))
         :timeout 10)

This breaks compatibility of course though, as do any sensible changes
I can think of. So meanwhile I would be happy if the patch got
accepted, it would at least make the library at all usable to me, even
if not the easiest to use.

Cheers,
Jarosław Rzeszótko