Accept headers and media parameters

The more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I get with the semantics
of the Accept header.  Section 8.1 of the 01 draft of HTTP/1.0 (sorry, I
don't have the 1.1 pre-draft handy) gives the example of:

Accept: text/*, text/html, text/html;version=2.0, */*

and describes the precedence of each item here.  However, it's less clear
what happens in a case like this:

Accept: text/html;version=3.0; q=1.0, text/html;version=1.0; q=0.5,
        text/plain; q=0.7

Now, support the requested entity is available as a text/html;version=2.0
document or a plaintext document.  What q does a text/html;version=2.0
document have in this case?  If figuring out the answer requires the parser
to somehow parse the values given to the version arguments, I think we're in
trouble.  If the answer is that q=0 since that type isn't specifically
listed, then in what cases are these semantics useful?

--
Jim Seidman, Senior Software Engineer
Spyglass Inc., 1230 E. Diehl Road, Naperville IL 60563

Received on Tuesday, 29 August 1995 06:59:11 UTC