Re: Content negotiation example needed.

At 01:50 PM 9/12/99 +0100, Alan J. Flavell wrote:
...
>I hope I'm not being too pedantic here, but I don't see anything in
>section 14.4 that explicitly permits a server to send a language
>variant that the client has said they do not accept. 
...

True, but Section 10.4.7 (which discusses the 406 status code) says:

"                             ...Depending upon the format and the
 capabilities of the user agent, selection of the most appropriate
 choice MAY be performed automatically. However, this specification
 does not define any standard for such automatic selection.

      Note: HTTP/1.1 servers are allowed to return responses which are
      not acceptable according to the accept headers sent in the
      request. In some cases, this may even be preferable to sending a
      406 response. User agents are encouraged to inspect the headers of
      an incoming response to determine if it is acceptable.

   If the response could be unacceptable, a user agent SHOULD
   temporarily stop receipt of more data and query the user for a
   decision on further actions."

Indeed most servers return unacceptable responses when there is one
alternative.
In this case they usually do not study the accept headers at all. It seems
that 
they MAY return unacceptable response even if there is more than one
alternative.

However I would agree with Alan that section 14 should be given a higher
weight, for the case of more than one alternative.

Regards,
Nir.
===================================
Nir Dagan
Assistant Professor of Economics
Brown University 
Providence, RI
USA

http://www.nirdagan.com
mailto:nir@nirdagan.com
tel:+1-401-863-2145

Received on Sunday, 12 September 1999 11:10:01 UTC