[9239] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Content negotiation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Shel Kaphan)
Wed Nov 8 22:27:52 1995
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 19:23:17 -0800
From: Shel Kaphan <sjk@amazon.com>
To: hedlund@best.com (M. Hedlund)
Cc: www-talk@w3.org
In-Reply-To: <v02120d00acc6fea41d1b@[204.176.214.104]>
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
M. Hedlund writes:
> Shel writes:
> >I think we should separate content negotiation from the issue of
> >browser capabilities.
...
> Does "browser capabilities" == "HTML tags and attributes recognized"?
>
It certainly *includes* that, but it also includes information
that has to do with the way the browser chooses to render, and
possibly other subtleties I can't think of at the moment.
I don't happen to have a list of such matters of interpretation handy,
but to be maximally useful to server application writers, such a database
would need to be able include annotations about fairly subtle
differences of browser behavior.
> If so, can't we just derive this information from DTD's[1]? DTD's already
> exist for Mozilla and Hotjava -- see <URL:http://www.halsoft.com/html/>.
>
That seems like a good idea, and as has been mentioned before, the
URL of such documents could be made available to servers, though I
kind of like not having to go find a document out there in hyperspace,
where it might not be found reliably, etc. It also seems like it
might be simpler to have a summary available that is more relevant to
the task at hand than to have to have a SGML parser the server
software, which is, I presume, what it would take. A list of
(attribute, value) pairs ought to do adequately, and would be really
simple to parse.
--Shel
