Re: UA norms for language content negotiation

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 12:14 AM, Robert J Burns wrote:
>
>>> [1]: <http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/ContentNegotiationNorms>
>
> This wiki page is definitely too brief right now. With your feedback I
> should be able to improve on it. My goal here is not to supplant HTTP
> content-negotiation nor to change anything about HTML. Instead I'm hoping to
> add normative language to the draft chapter 4 directed specifically at web
> browsers. Perhaps a subsection of chapter 4 could address language
> content-negotiation or even content-negotiation in general (e.g., others
> have raised issues of the need for content negotiation for media resource
> bitmap resolutions). It is indeed possible different UAs could solve this
> problem on their own, but after over a decade of HTTP content-negotiation we
> haven't seen that happen. My hope is that we can provide guidance to
> implementors to help bring about better client support for such content
> negotiation.

For this to work, servers would first have to implement RFC 2295 and
send appropriate Alternates response headers (otherwise UAs wouldn't
have any mean of discovering variants); unfortunately, I don't know of
any web server doing so (even Apache, though it uses an algorithm
inspired from RFC 2296 for negotiation, AFAIK).

-- 
Thomas Broyer

Received on Wednesday, 28 May 2008 23:34:28 UTC