Content negotiation requirements

On further reflection about the issues of content negotiation, I am coming
to think that there should be two (mainly) orthogonal issues here which
could be dealt with by separate statements of requirements (in either
common or separate requirement document[s]):

(1) Negotiation framework and metadata requirements which address the broad
goals of negotiation in a protocol-independent fashion.

(2) Specific requirements which relate to negotiation issues specific to
operating in an HTTP context (e.g. relation to HTTP protocol operations,
cache interactions, security issues, existing HTTP negotiation mechanisms,
application to variant selection, etc.).

My thoughts are prvoked in part by my reading of the Koen Holtman (et al)
negotiation draft:  he has clearly trying to separate protocol-dependent
issues from protocol-independent issues but I feel that the negotiation
metadata structures are still very much oriented to HTTP operations
(unnecessarily so, IMO).

GK.
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Graham Klyne
GK@ACM.ORG

Received on Friday, 4 July 1997 05:01:29 UTC