[10409] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Content Negociation: State of the art ?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Larry Masinter)
Sat Nov 9 02:03:44 1996
To: hfry@lep.research.philips.com
Cc: www-talk@w3.org
In-Reply-To: <32836F20.5391@lep.research.philips.com> (message from Herve
Frydlender on Fri, 8 Nov 1996 09:34:24 PST)
From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 1996 22:02:06 PST
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
The work on content negotiation and feature negotiation is active in
the HTTP working group (http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com). There's a draft by
Andy Mutz and Koen Holtmann, and comments on their draft would be
appreciated.
# For us, content negociation deals mainly with terminal capabilities
# (screen size, color vs B&W, memory, ... and client capabilities) but
# also with connection capabilities (bandwidth, reliability, delay).
While it seems reasonable for the client to tell the server about its
capabilities (screen size, color vs. B&W) and thse are things we've
accounted for, some of the other items are more problematic:
Who knows 'bandwidth, reliability, delay'? This is neither a client
nor a server characteristic. It seems more likely for clients to
provide some hint about their preferences and the server to judge, or
else to allow transparent negotiation where the server identifies what
it has and the client picks.
Client memory limits seem like a real problem, too.
Larry
