- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Sat, 7 Dec 1996 10:43:10 PST
- To: kweide@tezcat.com
- CC: www-international@w3.org
# If there is a need for a client to express "I can understand UTF-8, # but can only display some of the 10646 characters: ..." - and I # definitely think there is such a need - I don not see a way to implement # this cleanly. I think this kind of communication is along the same lines as: "I can implement all of HTML 3.5 tables, except I don't know anything about the 'border' parameter". That is, there may be a need to communicate special subset capabilities, but usually those limitations are transient and too fine-grained to actually matter in real communication. In general, in the web, we've avoided catering to fine-grained differentiation of client capabilities. Yes, you can say "I speak postscript" or not, but there's no good way to say "I can take postscript files but don't give me any that won't look good on little pieces of paper". There _is_ a proposal for allowing profiles of capabilities to be expressed and negotiated, and the proposal is elaborated in internet drafts: draft-holtman-http-negotiation-04.txt draft-ietf-http-feature-reg-00.txt and related topics in: draft-mutz-http-attributes-02.txt draft-goland-http-headers-00.txt from your nearby internet drafts directory. Perhaps 'support for particular subsets of ISO-10646' might fit into this category. Larry
Received on Saturday, 7 December 1996 13:43:07 UTC