Re: Content negotiation

M. Hedlund writes:
 > Shel writes:
 > >I think we should separate content negotiation from the issue of
 > >browser capabilities. 
	...

 > Does "browser capabilities" == "HTML tags and attributes recognized"?
 > 

It certainly *includes* that, but it also includes information 
that has to do with the way the browser chooses to render, and
possibly other subtleties I can't think of at the moment.
I don't happen to have a list of such matters of interpretation handy,
but to be maximally useful to server application writers, such a database
would need to be able include annotations about fairly subtle
differences of browser behavior.

 > If so, can't we just derive this information from DTD's[1]?  DTD's already
 > exist for Mozilla and Hotjava -- see <URL:http://www.halsoft.com/html/>.
 > 

That seems like a good idea, and as has been mentioned before, the
URL of such documents could be made available to servers, though I
kind of like not having to go find a document out there in hyperspace,
where it might not be found reliably, etc.  It also seems like it
might be simpler to have a summary available that is more relevant to
the task at hand than to have to have a SGML parser the server
software, which is, I presume, what it would take.  A list of
(attribute, value) pairs ought to do adequately, and would be really 
simple to parse.

--Shel

Received on Wednesday, 8 November 1995 22:26:27 UTC