[web-devel] Proposal: http-types

[Michael Snoyman]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 1:04 PM, Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

No matter what we will need the bytestring dependency to define the
CIByteString datatype. But is there an advantage to this polymorphism?
I can't think of a use case for a status message or a header to be
anything but a ByteString.

There *is* one possible datatype we could include which Johan hinted
at: ASCII. We could in theory have:

newtype ASCII = ASCII { unASCII :: ByteString }
byteStringToASCII :: ByteString -> Maybe ASCII
byteStringToASCII bs
    | S.all isValidAscii bs = Just $ ASCII bs
    | otherwise = Nothing

And so on and so forth for String, also providing some unsafeToAscii
functions and an unsafe IsString instace. I know I've wanted this
datatype in the past (WAI and mime-mail in particular), but I'm not
sure if it provides enough of a benefit to be worth the extra
overhead.

Michael