Re: Value of content negotiation? [was RE: content negotiation anti-principle]

My .02 -

Conneg (to be precise, server-driven negotiation, which seems to be most
relevent to this discussion) is IMO currently hobbled by two things;

* browser implementations - don't want to spew out all of the media types
they support, and they misuse the wildcard (as noted in CUAP [1]).

* server implementations - generally make it difficult to configure conneg
(e.g., expressing priority order, applying to multiple resources, etc.)

Despite this, the sites as well as intermediary logs that I've seen
indicate that conneg is alive and well on the Web, both on very large
sites as well as in niche applications. Like Simon, I'm inclined to treat
it as a pillar of the Web architecture, not something to be swept under
the carpet.

Cheers,

 1. http://www.w3.org/TR/cuap#cp-http-accept



----- Original Message -----
From: "Gavin Thomas Nicol" <gtn@rbii.com>
To: <www-tag@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 7:44 AM
Subject: Re: Value of content negotiation? [was RE: content negotiation
anti-principle]


>
> On Tuesday 07 January 2003 08:29 pm, Jeremy Dunck wrote:
> > I don't think that the lack of common usage is due lack of value.
It's a
> > question of bang for the buck.  Frankly, I think that tools have never
been
> > made to really leverage the features offered, and those tools that do
exist
> > still make it too expensive to accomplish.  We don't suppose that
since
> > people don't commonly fly to work, there's no interest in that.
>
> Technology without adoption is dead, and you may as well bury it... it
doesn't
> matter how good it might appear to be. SGML had the SGML declaration
which
> allowed you to do all kinds of nifty things to the syntax of SGML, and
to
> it's interpretation of character encodings. Time proved it wasn't worth
it,
> and so both XML and HTML are defined with a single SGML declaration... a
kind
> way of putting it out to pasture.
>
> Maybe lack of interest, and the complications people have with content
> negotiation hint that it's not finding a sweet spot?
>
> > I feel that for a particular conceptual resource, there may well be
> > multiple representations, but I also feel that each of those
> > representations might deserve its own URL.
>
> That's the heart of it. If I have
>
>   <img src="http://foo.bar.com/foo.jpg"/>
>
> and the server suddenly starts sending me a PIC representation, I'd
likely be
> unhappy.
>

Received on Thursday, 9 January 2003 00:37:09 UTC