- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 08:59:31 PDT
- To: Dave Kristol <dmk@research.bell-labs.com>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
> Apropos the discussion of compressing HTML, I have the following > question: suppose a user agent wants to apply a Content-Coding > to an entity it wants to POST. How does it know what encodings > the origin server accepts? There's no way to communicate a server's preference for encodings or formats in HTTP. In RFC 1867 ("file upload..."), an HTML form can contain an "Accept" attribute, as in <input type=file name=blah accept="application/postscript">, but there's no corresponding Accept-Encoding. There's a proposal for extending ESMTP to add content negotiation using HTTP Accept headers: draft-wing-smtp-capabilities-00.txt in which the recipient (SMTP server) asks for capabilities of the remote server. I could imagine adding another operation in which an HTTP client could ask a HTTP server, for a specific URL, to send appropriate request headers, including accept-encoding, accept, etc.. I think it is per-URL, though, and probably should have an Expires date on it. (Maybe the response is a message/http body, so that the normal cache headers could apply to the body.) Larry -- http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter
Received on Thursday, 11 September 1997 09:04:07 UTC