- From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@hq.lcs.mit.edu>
- Date: Wed, 24 Jan 96 17:56:08 EST
- To: masinter@parc.xerox.com, pjc@trusted.com
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
The web protocols have from time to time suffered a great blow because of the desire to encode in specs "current practice". This desire ignores any need for foresight or clean architecture. Content negotiation was planned from the early days as a flexibility point which separated HTTP and HTML, and would allow evolution of the web in ways we do not yet envision. It has been a hard sell because itse design involves sending a lot of bytes. However, the web is now suffering from its lack. Right now, there is confusion, user-agent abuse, lack of direction when it comes to introduction of HTML tables, PNG, progressibe jpeg, etc. Wait till you see applets available in AVI, Java, 386 machine code and Python. I feel that making this work is very important. I believe that removing it would be a disaster, and send exactly the wrong signals to the whole community. Tim BL PS: (I assume that it content negotiation can be made to work with fewer bytes). ___________________________________________________________ Tim Berners-Lee Director, W3 Consortium MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Phone +1 (617) 253 5702 545 Technology Square Fax +1 (617) 258 8682 Cambridge MA 02139, USA Email timbl@w3.org http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee
Received on Wednesday, 24 January 1996 14:58:08 UTC