Re: content negotiation

On Thu, 1 May 1997, Jeff de la Beaujardiere wrote:

> Content negotiation will be exceedingly useful when generating HTML
> dynamically and will perhaps be used most often in that context.  It's
> certainly much better than the horrible practice of checking the user agent
> field.  However, I don't know whether the negotiation scheme would allow
> different elements of the same static document to be handled well.  I think
> the server must respond with the entire document, at which point it's up to
> the UA to display what it can.

User-agent checking scripts don't cache properly, meaning they're either 
slow bandwidth hogs for overseas users, or get the agent wrong.

HTTP/1.1 supports content negotiation and cache properly. You get the 
whole document (or image, etc.).

You can always use e.g. JavaScript if supported to treat UAs differently

Andrew Daviel

Received on Thursday, 1 May 1997 20:37:14 UTC