Question about "406 None Acceptable"

The draft specifies that a 406 response must include the content-type,
content-encoding, and content-language of the resounce.  What is the correct
response when there are multiple variants of a document, none of which match?

As an example, suppose I have HTML versions of a resource in English,
French, and Russian.  Then I also have PDF versions in English, Spanish, and
Russian.  Lastly, I have a plaintext version in English which is only
available with gzip encoding.  The client asks a Russian plaintext version
be sent with a unity encoding.  (Assume here that the server doesn't do
translations and conversions on the fly.)

All of the versions have zero quality, since either the content-type or
content-encoding doesn't match the request.  But I can't really describe the
varieties of the resource that are available, since the semantics for
content-type and content-encoding don't provide for multiple tokens, and the
semantics for content-language are such that multiple tokens don't really
carry the correct meaning.  Also, not all permutations of the existing
types, encodings, and languages are available.

Am I missing something obvious?

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

Received on Thursday, 18 May 1995 09:44:52 UTC