- From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
- Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:32:22 -0400
- To: "Phillips, Addison" <addison@amazon.com>
- Cc: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, LTRU Working Group <ltru@ietf.org>, HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
Phillips, Addison scripsit: > I tend to think that HTTP's requirements are most like what the > Lookup algorithm provides. That is, you can (and must) return > exactly one result for a given request. Actually, no; that's an oversimplification of HTTP. The whole point of the error code 300 Multiple Choices is that the server has determined that more than one resource satisfies the prescriptions of the Accept-* headers as to the media types, charsets, content-encodings, and languages specified as allowable by the client. The body in that case will contain hyperlinks to the original resources. While this mechanism is not widely used in the Web today, it does serve the intended purpose: servers can make different variants of pages available, and clients see only the ones that they specify as meeting their minimum requirements. The question is, then, what to do if there is no resource that specifies those minimum requirements. Apache in this case applies the lookup algorithm to loosen the client requirement in hopes of finding something usable. -- Values of beeta will give rise to dom! John Cowan (5th/6th edition 'mv' said this if you tried http://www.ccil.org/~cowan to rename '.' or '..' entries; see cowan@ccil.org http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/odd.html)
Received on Monday, 27 July 2009 17:33:01 UTC