Content Negotiation: state of the art!

(At the suggestion of Larry Masinter, i'm making this note to the
HTTP-wg mailing list, although i and my mailbox cannot afford to
subscribe to yet another mailing list -- please cc replies directly.)

On www-talk, Larry Masinter wrote:
> The work on content negotiation and feature negotiation is active in
> the HTTP working group (http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com). There's a draft by
> Andy Mutz and Koen Holtmann, and comments on their draft would be
> appreciated.

And i replied:
> Thought i'd note -- i just went to have a look at this draft (i assume
> 
> ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-holtman-http-negotiation-03.txt
> 
> is the current version) and i'd like to say i rather like it, for what
> that's worth.  I'd be happy to see implementations of it get rolling!
> The sooner they appear, the faster all kinds of problems will be solved.

I'm basically writing this message to display support for this Con-Neg
draft and offer congratulations for Koen Holtman on producing this work.
I was even happier when i recently discovered the implementation on his
site, which i've tried out and works nicely.

So, for whatever my comments are worth, i'd like to call attention to
this draft because it looks like a good and flexible solution to me,
and i'm pretty thrilled that it actually exists and is implemented!

Could i make a polite request to Henrik Frystyk Nielsen to update the
list of drafts at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/Specs.html in
order to provide the HTML version of the draft and mention the sample
implementation at http://gewis.win.tue.nl/~koen/conneg/?

---
While skimming through the draft i wondered about two things:

Why do feature expressions allow "<=" but not ">=" ?  And as for the
following note:

>    The length attribute (if present) must reflect the length of the
>    variant alone, and not the sum of the lengths of the variant and
>    any objects inlined or embedded by the variant.

can i ask why?

Curious,


Ping
                                 Developer, Alias|Wavefront Inc. (Tokyo)
http://www.lfw.org/math/ brings math to the Web as easy as <se>?pi?</se>

Received on Sunday, 10 November 1996 17:55:03 UTC