- From: Dave Kristol <dmk@allegra.att.com>
- Date: Thu, 16 Nov 95 09:24:51 EST
- To: koen@win.tue.nl
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
koen@win.tue.nl (Koen Holtman) wrote: [a long proposal on content negotiation] [...] > User-agent header based negotiation > ----------------------------------- > > One of the requirements I have for HTTP/1.1 content negotiation is > that variant selection based on the contents of the User-Agent header > sent by the user agent is efficient. In my opinion, the v10-spec-01 > negotiation text does not satisfy this requirement. [...] > - The mechanism should allow negotiation based on the User-Agent > header to be efficient. [...] <purist> I really despise content negotiation based on User-Agent. </purist> One problem with such negotiation is it precludes a user's enabling/disabling features on the User-Agent. Suppose someone decided (Jeez, I don't know why) to disable tables in tables. If my User-Agent field says Browser/Version-with-tables-in-tables, this negotiation very likely may decide to send a tables-in-tables version of a resource. What then? OTOH, I sat in a meeting this week with a content vendor that uses User-Agent precisely to choose which content to send to a browser. Not just because of incompatibilities, but because there are users with older versions of once-hot browsers that now don't have the latest features. The content vendor wants to send the best possible content for each. Makes sense from that point of view. So, while I dislike the idea of some kind of feature profile, be it a bitmap or whatever, that would seem preferable to just going on User-Agent. Dave Kristol
Received on Thursday, 16 November 1995 06:29:36 UTC