Re: How to advertise acceptable content types sent via POST or PUT

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bjoern Hoehrmann" <derhoermi@gmx.net>

>
> See section 19.6.2.1 of RFC 2068,
RFC 2068 - Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
19.6.2.1 Alternates
   The Alternates response-header field has been proposed as a means for
   the origin server to inform the client about other available
   representations of the requested resource, along with their
   distinguishing attributes,

> section 8.3 of RFC 2295 and
RFC 2295 - Transparent Content Negotiation in HTTP
8.3 Alternates
   The Alternates response header is used to convey the list of variants
   bound to a negotiable resource.  This list can also include
   directives for any content negotiation process.  If a response from a
   transparently negotiable resource includes an Alternates header, this
   header MUST contain the complete variant list bound to the negotiable
   resource

> section 19.6.3 (last paragraph) of RFC 2616.
RFC 2616 - Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
19.6.3 Changes from RFC 2068
The Alternates, Content-Version, Derived-From, Link, URI, Public and
   Content-Base header fields were defined in previous versions of this
   specification, but not commonly implemented. See RFC 2068.


> There is no means I am aware of to
> inform the client about acceptable media types for POST/PUT/...
> requests, but a server will send status 415 if the request entity media
> type is unsupported.

Thanks for the info! Good stuff.

If Alternates indicates the media type for a representation of a resource -
and PUT will store that representation, while not explicit, it may make
sense to try using Alternates as the acceptable format for a PUT. I'd rather
have a more explicit mechanism though, since Alternates seems connected with
GET.

Received on Friday, 10 January 2003 21:10:50 UTC