[web-devel] Proposal: http-types

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> Let's speak practically here about what kind of types we're dealing with:
>
> * Status, including the numeric code and status message. Eg, data
> Status = Status Int ByteString
> * Request/response header key. In WAI, I use data CIByteString =
> CIByteString !ByteString !ByteString, one version being the lowercase,
> the other the original.
> * Request/response header value. In WAI, I use ByteString.
> * Status values like we have in WAI: status200/statusOK,
> status404/statusNotFound, etc.
> * A bunch of header keys: hdrContentType, hdrAccept, etc

I think all the above is exactly what should be in the package. You
shouldn't include Request/Response, but you should include all the
Int/String-like values that users of http need. I also think it should
be http-codes or similar, it's not defining a type.

Why not do:

hdrContentType :: IsString a => a

And similarly for all values that are just strings. You eliminate the
bytestring package dependency, and nothing will need to know whether
things are String, Text, LazyByteString, ByteString or CIByteString
(or even Builder values).

You could also have:

data HttpStatus = HttpStatus Int a

statusOK :: IsString a => HttpStatus a

In Hoogle I define a few things like hdrContentType, so if these were
all standardized it would be great.

Thanks, Neil