Color content negotiation

I'm not that familiar with all content negotiation and MIME type
issues, but I have been wondering whether content negotiation allows
for the automatic selection between color and monochrome variants of
(inline) pictures.  If it does not, it should.

One of the biggest problems facing web picture designers today is to
make their color pictures look good when dithered on a monochrome
(black and white) screen.

I don't believe there are separate mime types for monochrome and color
variants of gif/jpeg/... pictures, so maybe HTTP needs to an
additional accept header, Accept-Color, similar to Accept-Language.
For example:

  Accept-Color: monochrome, multicolor;qco=0.5
  Accept-Color: 8bit, 2bit;qco=0.5, 24bit;qco=0.7

Color types would include something like:

  monochrome
  multicolor
  greyscale
  2bit   (=monochrome)
  8bit   (8 bit multicolor)
  24bit  (24 bit multicolor)

Maybe there should also be something like an `8bit, but I prefer it if
you only use 100 separate colors' type, I don't know enough about the
problems of adequately rendering multiple 256-color pictures, all
using different colormaps, on a single 8-bit color screen to be the
judge of that.

Koen.

Received on Wednesday, 6 September 1995 14:50:05 UTC