SERVER_PROTOCOL ? ( was Re: Microsoft IE ... )

While User-Agent can be used as a means of determining what type of content
can be sent, I think everyone agrees that it is an ugly solution that has
several problems.

What I have thought that might be a different solution would be the use of
SERVER_PROTOCOL.  Right now it always returns HTTP/1.0 which isn't really
that useful.  I think I saw in the spec that you can tack on an HTTP
extension version to the end of the HTTP/1.0.  Wouldn't it be useful if
browsers sent HTTP/1.0/1.0 if they support HTML version 1.0 and HTTP/1.0/2.0
if they supported HTML version 2.0?  Yes, this doesn't solve everything
given the Netscape extensions, but at least we would know which HTML
standard the browser can support.  I think this would be a tremendous
improvement over the current state of affairs, and would give some weight to
the different HTML versions.

I guess we could create a new tag called HTML_VERSION or something like it
if we did not want to extend SERVER_PROTOCOL in this way.

To get around the problem of things like the 3.0 spec still being developed
[ or at least the last time I checked... ] you could have a 2.5 spec which
includes everything in 3.0 that everyone agrees on.


Chris Kirby

Received on Monday, 29 January 1996 15:13:19 UTC