Re: [whatwg] Accept header

On Wed, 30 Jul 2014, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> 
> it would be desirable to have Accept / Accept-Language be set by APIs, 
> such as <img>. XMLHttpRequest already does this (unless a developer 
> added those headers), see http://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/
> 
> If we are eventually going to expose something like a "Fetch" object for 
> each API that can issue a fetch it would seem best if these details were 
> defined at the API-level.
> 
> I guess for now I'll add some notes to the network-level bits of Fetch 
> to indicate Accept / Accept-Language cannot be set at that point by the 
> user agent.

There's three ways that I see:

 1. Expose it on a "fetch" object available from all the places that can 
    do fetches. (HTMLImageElement, XMLHttpRequest, StyleSheet, etc)

       var img = new Image();
       img.src = 'foo.png';
       img.fetch.doWhateverWithTheAcceptHeader('foo');

 2. Expose a dedicated attribute on relevant elements, that sets the 
    default fetch settings, either using some generic syntax:

       <img src="foo.png" fetchoptions="{whatever:{accept:'foo'}}">

    ...or some nicer dedicated syntax:

       <img src="foo.png" fetchoptions="accept: foo; whatever: bar">

 3. Have multiple dedicated attributes:

       <img src="foo.png" accept=foo whatever=bar>

These are not mutually exclusive.

I would avoid adding the non-API sugar versions (content attributes, 
especially the dedicated ones) for anything that didn't have significant 
compelling use cases.

Note that "Accept" _should_ probably be set by the UA for images, since 
the author can't know what image types are supported.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 30 July 2014 18:35:53 UTC