Re: Value of content negotiation? [was RE: content negotiation anti-principle]

On Tuesday 07 January 2003 08:29 pm, Jeremy Dunck wrote:
> I don't think that the lack of common usage is due lack of value.  It's a
> question of bang for the buck.  Frankly, I think that tools have never been
> made to really leverage the features offered, and those tools that do exist
> still make it too expensive to accomplish.  We don't suppose that since
> people don't commonly fly to work, there's no interest in that.

Technology without adoption is dead, and you may as well bury it... it doesn't 
matter how good it might appear to be. SGML had the SGML declaration which 
allowed you to do all kinds of nifty things to the syntax of SGML, and to 
it's interpretation of character encodings. Time proved it wasn't worth it, 
and so both XML and HTML are defined with a single SGML declaration... a kind 
way of putting it out to pasture.

Maybe lack of interest, and the complications people have with content 
negotiation hint that it's not finding a sweet spot?

> I feel that for a particular conceptual resource, there may well be
> multiple representations, but I also feel that each of those
> representations might deserve its own URL.

That's the heart of it. If I have

  <img src="http://foo.bar.com/foo.jpg"/>

and the server suddenly starts sending me a PIC representation, I'd likely be 
unhappy.

Received on Wednesday, 8 January 2003 10:45:35 UTC