Proposal on removing Content Negotiation from http 1.1

I would like to propose that content negotiation is removed from http 1.1

Thus accept: headers are ignored. Greatly simplifies caching decisions since
response == entity. 

I beleive that very little content negotiation takes place (even within
this archive you see people explicitly refering different versions of
papers..)

The assumtion that current content negotiation makes is that there is
no prior knowledge. In most cases a user will have selected a specific 
URL in a previous page they have retrieved.

This proposal removes large areas that are causing concerns in the current
review process and merely reflects current practice.

Without having dynamic content retrieval allows micro servers to return
pre-canned responses. Few CGI scripts return more that one variation etc etc.

No intelligent server mechanism is a intelligent as the dumbest human..

Without it, I feel that 1.1 will meet the goals stated in section
	1.1 Purpose

If you feel that it is a must then the simplest case is to return a
precanned entity that in some standard format lists the URL's and the 
content types each represents and then let the client do all the work.

Pete.
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Received on Wednesday, 24 January 1996 11:06:02 UTC