Variants support in the latest HTTP 1.0 Draft.

cvr@frontiertech.com
Thu, 09 Nov 1995 09:17:59 PST


I have a couple of questions on the support for variants in the latest
HTTP Specs.

1. How does a client request the right variant from the servers?
In the earlier specs of HTTP there used to be Accept: headers that
would tell a server which kind of varint the client is interested -- by
requesting desired Media-Type that included a charset, Language and/or
Encoding.
I am not clear why the Accept header and the Content Negotiation
Algorithm are dropped from the latest specs?
The section 7.2.1 states that
" the recepient may attempt to guess the media type via inspection of
its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URL used to identify
the resource"

How could one determine a variant entirely from the extension? Say, I
have a document "/brochure.html" that is in different
languages ( with the same base Media-type as text/html but different
charsets: "US-ASCII" and "ISO-2022-JP" ). How would a client that is
interested in "ISO-2022-JP" variant specify?

2. The second question that I have in my mind is that can clients make
use of parameters in the HTTP URI to request a variant, like
"GET /brochure.html; charset="ISO-2022-JP"?

Thanks much for your time!

/cvr

CVR Murthy
Engineering, Frontier Technologies Corp.