[9727] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
SERVER_PROTOCOL ? ( was Re: Microsoft IE ... )
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Chris Kirby)
Mon Jan 29 15:22:26 1996
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 14:13:16 -0600
To: www-talk@w3.org
From: cmk@io.com (Chris Kirby)
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
While User-Agent can be used as a means of determining what type of content
can be sent, I think everyone agrees that it is an ugly solution that has
several problems.
What I have thought that might be a different solution would be the use of
SERVER_PROTOCOL. Right now it always returns HTTP/1.0 which isn't really
that useful. I think I saw in the spec that you can tack on an HTTP
extension version to the end of the HTTP/1.0. Wouldn't it be useful if
browsers sent HTTP/1.0/1.0 if they support HTML version 1.0 and HTTP/1.0/2.0
if they supported HTML version 2.0? Yes, this doesn't solve everything
given the Netscape extensions, but at least we would know which HTML
standard the browser can support. I think this would be a tremendous
improvement over the current state of affairs, and would give some weight to
the different HTML versions.
I guess we could create a new tag called HTML_VERSION or something like it
if we did not want to extend SERVER_PROTOCOL in this way.
To get around the problem of things like the 3.0 spec still being developed
[ or at least the last time I checked... ] you could have a 2.5 spec which
includes everything in 3.0 that everyone agrees on.
Chris Kirby
