Re: Deploying new versions [Was: Versioning HTML at the

Jim Davis (davis@DRI.cornell.edu)
Mon, 31 Oct 1994 08:02:14 -0500


Date: Mon, 31 Oct 1994 03:41:50 +0100
Originator: www-talk@info.cern.ch
From: Marc VanHeyningen <mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu>

> Thirdly, if I create some HTML 3 documents and put them on my server,
> which I intend to do, if I get my server to spit out
>
> Content-type: text/html; version=3.0
>
> will this break anything? Will it offend anyone? Will it help anyone?

This will break almost all existing clients. Most of them are not
smart enough to parse content-types according to MIME rules but
will simply determine that "text/html; version=2.0" is not a
recognized content-type and prompt the user to save the result in a
file....It's a pity, because it's obviously the right way to
provide versioning information but existing software won't work
with it.

Marc is right. The Dienst technical report server uses (tries to use)
such parameterized Mime types, but we've decided to stop because, as
Marc observes, almost ALL clients are broken thus our users kept
complaining. Dienst was sending a valid Mime type but the clients
could not handle it.

Not complaining, just confirming.