Re: feature negotiation

On Mon, 26 Feb 1996, Murray Altheim wrote:
>     http://www.stonehand.com/murray/draft-altheim-fpi-ptd-00.txt

Murray - it would be cool if you wrapped lines at 80 characters or less 
in this draft.... or used HTML of course. :)

> Appendix B discusses a possible feature negotiation scenario. I haven't
> updated the e-text to match my handwritten notes, but it provides a rough
> sketch with some things I have or need to fix. I will try to update this
> document to a version altheim-02 this week, incorporating these notes. It
> is currently not ready for draft submission, so please consider it a
> work-in-progress.

The important thing about Appendix B is that, unlike Larry's strawman, it's a
proposal for *client-side* conditional HTML, instead of server-side
negotiation.  I strongly believe client-side is the way to go, for a myriad
of reasons I outlined previously in a message to www-talk [1].  It still
requires a feature set registry of some sort, be it IANA or de facto (in a
document describing a new feature set, a keyword is declared and if it
doesn't clash, is reserved, even in the absence of a DTD or formal proposal). 

Instead of going into diatribe mode here (particularly since we're 
not talking about a standards-track document) I'll try and see if 
I can round some of us up during the IETF to see what others think on the 
issue. 

	Brian

[1] - http://www.eit.com/www.lists/www-talk.1996q1/0018.html

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