HTTP idea

I just wanted to bounce this idea around to the folks on this list:

It would be nice if UAs had a way of giving a webserver a GUID to  
identify themselves, along with a list of accepted media types. That  
list could then be checked against for every request on a keep-alive  
connection, without the UA having to repeatedly send huge Accept*  
headers.

Then if, say, a new plug-in was installed, or the language changed,  
they could send the same GUID and an updated Accept* header to  
replace the old one, and new negotiated content would be received  
with the next request.


The problem I'm trying to solve is one of increasingly large Accept  
headers as UAs become more sophisticated. Current practice is to  
append an asterisk to the end of the list, in effect saying "I will  
accept any format that could ever get invented" despite obviously not  
being able to handle future formats.
We have already seen this with new image formats.


And we could shave off another two unnecessary response headers from  
the bulk of pages by defining default values for Content-Script-Type  
and Content-Style-Type. I presume this has been brought up before,  
but a search of the archives for both header names returned no  
results. May I ask why this was not done in HTTP/1.1 ?

- Nicholas.