Call for compatibility testers

The transparent content negotiation draft
(http://gewis.win.tue.nl/~koen/conneg/) currently specifies the 300
response code for list responses.  

It turns out that this is not compatible with several existing
browsers: lynx and some versions of Mosaic fail to display anything if
they get back a 3xx class response without a Location header.  As lynx
in particular will be important for some people who want to offer
negotiated material, this rules out use of the 300 response code in
transparent content negotiation.

I have done some checking, and it seems that the creation of a new
response code:

  416 List Response

is the best way to get downwards compatibility.

The question now is: does 416 indeed cause compatible behavior with
all existing browsers?  To find out, I have made a test page:

  http://gewis.win.tue.nl/~koen/conneg/test-416.html

and am calling for everyone who has a web browser other than NetScape,
NCSA Mosaic, or Lynx to do the compatibility test on the page.  This
won't take longer than 20 seconds.  I'll report a summary of the
results back to the list.

Thanks,

Koen.

Received on Thursday, 8 August 1996 07:47:23 UTC