Re: Content negotiation

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@beach.w3.org)
Wed, 08 Nov 1995 22:05:13 -0500

In message <Pine.SGI.3.91.951108142712.17261P-100000@fully.organic.com>, Brian
Behlendorf writes:
>On Wed, 8 Nov 1995, Shel Kaphan wrote:
>> And by the way, I wasn't talking about course-grained, dynamic
>> content-negotiation per se, but about the fine grained and constant
>> properties of browsers such as "can-center-text",
>> "tables-can-contain-forms", etc.
>
>Crucial design goal decision time, folks:
>
>Do we want to support, through mechanisms in HTTP, the ability to express
>a bitmap of capabilities within specific content types (like HTML), or
>not?

I don't think so. But I'm not sure. I'd sure like to be sure.

If I had (1) time to hammer out a comprehensive spec for content
negotiation, or (2) more time to hack on a browser to work out these
implementation issues, I'd feel more comfortable commenting.

I expect to free up some time (somebody's time, anyway) for this in
the near future (probably after Xmas) but until then, I'm afraid I
can't help much.

We've discussed the issues ad-nauseum, and my only conclusion is that
it's not so simple as it once looked. I encourage folks to experiment
and report their results. (As an example, take a look at the HTTP-WG
discussions on multiple-transactions-per-connection in HTTP. Plenty
of performance numbers and such. Good stuff.)

Dan