[9715] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Microsoft IE -- it just gets better and better
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Meyer)
Mon Jan 29 13:21:05 1996
In-Reply-To: <199601291740.LAA28362@hopf.math.nwu.edu>
From: mwm@contessa.phone.net (Mike Meyer)
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 10:02:48 PST
To: www-talk@w3.org
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
> > Could most of this be handled with media type registration? E.g., if
> > Netscape were to accept: text/html and text/netscape-2.0-html, then
> > Microsoft's browser could express its willingness to accept either or
> > both. Is this a workable solution?
> I agree with others that this is probably not adequate for the
> distinctions content providers want to make.
Just specifying text/netscape-html probably works for 90% of the
content providers who care, as most of them seem to want nothing more
than to distinguish netscape from the rest of the world. Adding a
version number to the MIME type (either as text/netscape-#.#-html or
as text/netscape-html; version=2.0) would probably keep 90% of the
rest happy, as they get the exact same information from this Accept:
header as they are now getting from the User-agent: header.
MS could then achieve the same effect they got with the User-Agent:
hack by adding a single type to the Accept: headers. This removes
their incentive to do user-agent hacking. This should make the few
content providers who care enough to distinguish between more than a
fraction of a percent of the available browsers happier as well.
Yes, it's not a complete solution, and it's not perfect. But it solves
the majority of users problems, and is a lot better than what we've
got now.
<mike
