[10789] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: media-type version information in future versions of HTTP?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Koen Holtman)
Tue May 6 03:46:26 1997
From: koen@win.tue.nl (Koen Holtman)
To: clintdw@netcom.com (Clinton Wong)
Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 09:32:11 +0200 (MET DST)
Cc: www-talk@w3.org
In-Reply-To: <199705052342.QAA04942@netcom12.netcom.com> from "Clinton Wong" at May 5, 97 04:42:34 pm
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
Clinton Wong:
>
>
>In future versions of HTTP, would it be a nice feature to have
>a version number as a parameter to the content-type and accept
>header in HTTP? Let me explain...
>
>To specify that a document is HTML 3.2 compliant, one might
>want to upgrade HTTP to include things like:
>
>Content-type: text/html (v3.2)
>
>or to specify components of HTML, how about extra parameters to
>specify what capabilities are expected of the client? For example,
>if frames are used, the header might look like:
>
>Content-type: text/html (v3.2/frames)
[...]
The HTTP-wg is already working on a system to do this type of thing:
it is called feature negotiation. Read some sections in
http://gewis.win.tue.nl/~koen/conneg/draft-ietf-http-negotiation-01.html
for an introduction. Some parts of this draft are still subject to
change. In fact, there will probably be a new version this week.
[...]
> - One can keep statistics about the capabilities of
> web browsers and servers. It might be possible to
> say things like "84% of our hits are from browsers
> that understand Cascading Style Sheets."
You can do this even now, using the User-Agent request header. You
will need some database to map agent names and versions to feature
sets, though.
>Regards,
>Clinton
Koen.
