Variants support in the latest HTTP 1.0 Draft.

I have a couple of questions on the support for variants in the latest 
HTTP Specs.

1. How does a client request the right variant from the servers?
In the earlier specs of HTTP there used to be Accept: headers that 
would tell a server which kind of varint the client is interested -- by 
requesting desired Media-Type that included a charset, Language and/or 
Encoding. 
I am not clear why the Accept header and the Content Negotiation 
Algorithm are dropped from the latest specs? 
The section 7.2.1 states that 
" the recepient may attempt to guess the media type via inspection of 
its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URL used to identify 
the resource"

How could one determine a variant entirely from the extension? Say,  I 
have a document "/brochure.html" that is in different 
languages ( with the same base Media-type as text/html but different 
charsets: "US-ASCII" and "ISO-2022-JP" ). How would a client that is 
interested in "ISO-2022-JP" variant specify?

2. The second question that I have in my mind is that can clients make 
use of parameters in the HTTP URI to request a variant, like 
"GET /brochure.html; charset="ISO-2022-JP"?

Thanks much for your time!

/cvr

CVR Murthy
Engineering, Frontier Technologies Corp.

Received on Thursday, 9 November 1995 10:18:26 UTC