Re: PEP Battle Plan [rexmit, garbled]

At 03:38 PM 10/20/96 +0200, Koen Holtman wrote:

>[...]
>> selection of multiple variants of a resource (by 
>>allowing the client, rather than the server, to make the selection),  
>
>PEP negotiates on _services_.  Negotiation on _content_ is orthogonal
>to PEP, and this WG is already working on a content negotiation
>mechanism with the attributes you mention above.

I don't think there's much of a difference at all! PEP is about extensions
and as more Web applications get beefed up with plug-ins, the capabilities
that many content providers in practice infer from the User-Agent becomes
invalid or at least a small subset. Current examples are HTML math, style
sheets, and HTML tables not to mention what versions of these are
supported. These things may very well be supported by plug-ins and hence
the distance between extensions and content negotiation disappears.

The only dimension currently in content negotiation that is difficult to
consider in this game is natural language but it is by no means
"untouchable". It's all features, really, and this is why PEP is
interesting as being part of HTTP.

Henrik

--
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, <frystyk@w3.org>
World Wide Web Consortium, MIT/LCS NE43-356
545 Technology Square, Cambridge MA 02139, USA

Received on Sunday, 20 October 1996 16:07:34 UTC