[9238] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Content negotiation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel W. Connolly)
Wed Nov 8 22:06:59 1995
To: Brian Behlendorf <brian@organic.com>
Cc: Shel Kaphan <sjk@amazon.com>, www-talk@w3.org
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 08 Nov 1995 15:09:46 PST."
<Pine.SGI.3.91.951108142712.17261P-100000@fully.organic.com>
Date: Wed, 08 Nov 1995 22:05:13 -0500
From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@beach.w3.org>
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
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
