Re: media-type version information in future versions of HTTP?

Clinton Wong:
>
>
>In future versions of HTTP, would it be a nice feature to have
>a version number as a parameter to the content-type and accept
>header in HTTP?  Let me explain...
>
>To specify that a document is HTML 3.2 compliant, one might
>want to upgrade HTTP to include things like:
>
>Content-type: text/html (v3.2)
>
>or to specify components of HTML, how about extra parameters to
>specify what capabilities are expected of the client?  For example,
>if frames are used, the header might look like:
>
>Content-type: text/html (v3.2/frames)
[...]

The HTTP-wg is already working on a system to do this type of thing:
it is called feature negotiation.  Read some sections in

http://gewis.win.tue.nl/~koen/conneg/draft-ietf-http-negotiation-01.html

for an introduction.  Some parts of this draft are still subject to
change.  In fact, there will probably be a new version this week.

[...]
>  - One can keep statistics about the capabilities of
>    web browsers and servers.  It might be possible to
>    say things like "84% of our hits are from browsers
>    that understand Cascading Style Sheets."

You can do this even now, using the User-Agent request header.  You
will need some database to map agent names and versions to feature
sets, though.

>Regards,
>Clinton

Koen.

Received on Tuesday, 6 May 1997 03:32:34 UTC