Standards compliance
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## Standards compliance

neon is intended to be compliant with the IETF and W3C standards which it implements, with a few exceptions due to practical necessity or interoperability issues. These exceptions are documented in this section.

### RFC 2518, HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring—WebDAV

neon is deliberately not compliant with section 23.4.2, and treats property names as a (namespace-URI, name) pair. This is generally considered to be correct behaviour by the WebDAV working group, and is likely to formally adopted in a future revision of the specification.

### RFC 2616, Hypertext Transfer Protocol—HTTP/1.1

There is some confusion in this specification about the use of the “identity” transfer-coding. neon treats the presence of any `Transfer-Encoding` response header as an indication that the response message uses the “chunked” transfer-coding. This was the suggested resolution proposed by Larry Masinter.

### RFC 2617, HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication

neon is not strictly compliant with the quoting rules given in the grammar for the `Authorization` header. The grammar requires that the `qop` and `algorithm` parameters are not quoted, however one widely deployed server implementation (Microsoft® IIS 5) rejects the request if these parameters are not quoted. neon sends these parameters with quotes—this is not known to cause any problems with other server implementations.

### Namespaces in XML

The neon XML parser interface will accept and parse without error some XML documents which are well-formed according to the XML specification but do not conform to the "Namespaces in XML" specification [REC-XML-names]. Specifically: the restrictions on the first character of the `NCName` rule are not all implemented; neon will allow any `CombiningChar`, `Extender` and some characters from the `Digit` class in this position.

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