Re: Content negotiation for request bodies

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008, Adrien de Croy wrote:

>
> David Morris wrote:
> >
> > This should reduce error case to a few stupid servers which don't provide
> > proper clues.  Tring what is likely to succeed based on history with the
> > server or its application peers will actually have a very low error rate.
> >
> >
> I can't even begin to imagine the administrative nightmare of trying to
> provide proper hints in a redirect about capabilities of some other server.
>

Not really an administrative problem ... there is no way with a commonly
used modern browser to initiate a large request without the existance of
an HTML form (or active content included in HTML). Such forms are
generally going to target the same administrative space as the
server sending the original form. If the client has no information as to
what form of a request is acceptable, it can try the safe but not optimum
approach or try something more optimum and be prepared to recover from an
error. Remembering what happened on the current request will provide
optimization opportunities for the next.

In terms of non-browser clients, it seems very likely that they will have
apriori knowledge of the unique servers they will be interacting with. If
not, something like OPTIONS or a special GET can be used to acquire the
needed list of choices.

Dave Morris

Received on Monday, 25 February 2008 01:10:07 UTC