RE: Content negotiation issues (was XInclude)

> From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of
> Simon St.Laurent
> Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2002 3:54 AM
> To: www-tag@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Content negotiation issues (was XInclude)
>
> ...
>
> I believe it's actually derived from frustration with what I see as an
> unnecessarliy fatalistic error on the part of specification developers,
> who apparently feel that the relationship between resources and
> representations should be beyond their control.  In fact, HTTP 1.1 and a
> variety of other specifications allow that relationship to be part of a
> conversation, should a developer step up to the plate.
>
> ...

Strong agreement.

For instance, XSLT's (or XPath's) document function allows to retrieve the
representation of a resource, but in the case of an HTTP URI, the stylesheet
author has no way to control the desired mime type (for instance). This may
result in the HTTP server sending an HTML representation, although in fact
he *could* provide an XHTML representation, and that's indeed what the
stylesheet would need.

Or am I missing something?

Julian

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Received on Tuesday, 31 December 2002 05:59:18 UTC