New content negotiation draft: draft-ietf-http-negotiation-02.txt

I have made a new version of the transparent content negotiation
draft, draft-ietf-http-negotiation-02.txt, available at the usual
place:

 http://gewis.win.tue.nl/~koen/conneg/

As usual, there is a text version, a HTML version, and there are
versions with changebars.  The text version has also been submitted to
the ID editor.

Most changes in the new version reflect hallway discussions at the
Memphis IETF and at WWW6.  The feature tag syntax is the same as in
the previous draft.

As indicated earlier, I think that this work is basically finished,
and I want to freeze it Real Soon Now because some implementers are
waiting for it.  My goal is to make the next version the final
version.

Major changes in this version are:

     - Explanatory text about the length of variant lists and about
       the relation with other negotiation schemes has been added.

     - In order to make the variant description definitions more
       accessible other groups who want to re-use this metadata
       format,

       - an appendix with an example of a local variant selection
         algorithm has been added

       - the description of feature negotiation has been made
         independent of HTTP concepts: it no longer relies on the
         HTTP-specific Accept-Features header.

     - To make it easier to future negotiation schemes to re-use the
       transparent content negotiation transport/caching
       infrastructure, and to make it easier for protocols which work
       on top of transparent content negotiation to override parts of
       the transparent content negotiation requirements temporarily,

       - the requirement that an Alternates header is always included
         in a negotiated response has been dropped

       - the vocabulary of the Negotiate and TCN headers has been
         expanded to accommodate new types of variant selection

       - a `server-side override' mode has been added.

In addition, some existing text has been improved.


Happy reading!

Koen.

Received on Monday, 26 May 1997 12:24:35 UTC