Original text:
to be deployed without fear that they will be blindly forwarded by older intermediaries.  The Connection header field's value has the following grammar: Connection options are case-insensitive.

Reviewer comments:
NAME the ABNF is not the source of truth; as discussed, it's the recommended generated form. We have prose in that we use to do things like explicitly allow LFs to be separators and folding to be performed. Given that there is confusion, interoperability issues and security issues around bare CRs, a clear requirement seems proportional - especially when the ABNF does not specify error handling. I could see an argument to downgrade the requirement relating to generation to a note that it's not allowed, and I could see broadening the language in semantics to say that CRLF and LF are also not allowed.
For field values (Semantics), we clarify that these are illegal to generate. For recipients, we can say that for error handling, rejecting or converting to SP is common. Not sure what else needs to be said in Messaging.
I think that the security aspect justifies a new requirement; how about "MUST either reject or remove; suggest replacing with SP"? I was thinking about outside the field values -- mostly in the request-line and status-line. That said, I agree it's much less of a concern there, and I'm OK with dropping it if you think it's not worth it. I'll update the PR if you think the above is workable.
s/MUST either reject or remove/MUST either reject or replace/ ...I guess. Yes, that sounds right to me; although there might be pusback on the MUST (me neutral). The part for Messaging I believe deserves a separate issue and discussion.
NAME I'll make a change note in Messaging. WRT Semantics, the adjacent text about folding effectively deals with LF and CRLF. If you want to go to the trouble of separating into two issues and two pull requests, feel free. I'd rather just get it closed.
/me looks - NAME it already is called out. Please re-review.
On my agenda for today.
opened for field values
Splitting the issue was king of intrusive, sorry for that. The changes for [Messaging] have been merged. For [Semantics] please see URL
Popular clients handle LF, CR, and CRLF as newlines. HTTP only defines CRLF. Previously: URL
To clarify, this is about the CRLF in the HTTP-message production.
Covered here: URL ... but I agree it could be more visible (e.g., in 3).
And clients also accept lone CR. It seems worth testing either that they reject (network error) or adding that.
NAME see - in situ, see URL I'm still not sure it's obvious enough to someone reading in isolation; thoughts?
NAME that text does not treat CR without LF as a newline, unless I'm missing something. That text even seems to suggest that CRCRLF would be a single newline, whereas I'm pretty sure it ends up being treated as two newlines.
NAME I'm pretty sure CR alone is not valid, because I remember such a discussion a few years ago by the time haproxy used to accept this, after which I removed support for this. CRCRLF could at best be considered as a CR at the end of a line, though normally it's not a valid character there. It may possibly be replaced by LWS though.
Just found it, its in RFC7230.5 : URL Although the line terminator for the start-line and header fields is the sequence CRLF, a recipient MAY recognize a single LF as a line terminator and ignore any preceding CR.
Right, I realize it's not valid, but I also know that clients nevertheless accept it, which is why I raised this.
All clients?
If they don't, they're not interoperable on the Web as we know it.
The Web as we know it does not contain any CR-only line-delimited protocol services other than those deliberately attempting response smuggling. The protocol specifically forbids bare CR as a line delimiter, since that is known to not be interoperable with the vast majority of protocol parsers that exclusively check for LF and ignore CR. This was a big deal in 1994, but even then it was obvious that CR-delimited messages wouldn't make it through proxies. Nobody has objected to it since OS X was released and the last of the native Mac servers disappeared. If some browsers interpret CR as a line delimiter in HTTP protocol fields (other than payload content), they have security holes that should be fixed. No change to the RFC is possible here; we can't make changes that introduce new security holes to previously compliant parsers.
I wrote some tests for this: URL Suggestions for more tests appreciated. Firefox seems to generally take the CR and include it in the value of whatever preceded it (reason phrase or header value, despite those not allowing this character). Chrome and Safari treat it as LF in those places, but they do not allow two CRs to end the header block (network error in Safari, empty body in Chrome). It does seem that a stricter stance is possible here, given the intersection of the results. cc NAME NAME
If we can be stricter here and just fail on CRs in headers, that sounds good to me. That having been said, I think changing behavior to anything but just rejecting the response would be worse than the status quo (Treating CRs as part of header values, for instance).
Yeah, it seems like CR CR could be treated as a network error at least. CR "after" reason phrase or individual header is less clear. But I agree that making CR part of the value isn't good.
Regarding at the end of the line, we currently say?

Revised text:
to be deployed without fear that they will be blindly forwarded by older intermediaries. <ins> Furthermore, intermediaries SHOULD remove or replace field(s) whose semantics are known to require removal before forwarding, whether or not they appear as a Connection option, after applying those fields' semantics.  This includes but is not limited to: </ins> The Connection header field's value has the following grammar: Connection options are case-insensitive.