Re: Content negotiation

Arnt Gulbrandsen (agulbra@troll.no)
Thu, 9 Nov 1995 14:32:12 +0100


On Wed 8 Nov 1995 15:09:46 -0800,
Brian Behlendorf <brian@organic.com> wrote:
> 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?

In HTTP? For a browser to say, in its request, "the answer to this
request will not tickle a bug in my support of forms inside tables"
seems patently ridiculous.

If a server wants that detailed browser information, it _must_ obtain
the information from some source which can be updated as new bugs in a
browser is discovered. (By browser I mean not only name but version
and even compilation time.)

--Arnt