Re: suggested enhancement

At 2003-08-07T11:30-0400, O-Man wrote:-

> Hello.  I have a set of web applications that dynamically generate
> XHTML, WML and CHTML via a content negotiation process that uses the
> Accept and User-Agent header values.  Your validator doesn't send an
> Accept header and it doesn't allow me to specify an Accept header value.
>  Therefore I'd have to write some special-case rules to get my site to
> return XHTML content based on your validator's User-Agent value (which
> I'd rather not do).  It would be nice if your interface would allow me
> to specify an Accept value of  "text/html" (for instance).

There's already a feature request for Accept* headers[*]. (It seems
unlikely that the same would be done for User-Agent (at least on
validator.w3.org) (though I can't speak for the Validator team).)

[*] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=18

(The suggested tunneling of the headers would be especially useful with
/check/referer.)

Meanwhile, those applications /should/ be sending a Content-Location
header containing a URI corresponding to the variant selected by content
negotiation; you could pass that URI to the validator and no further
negotiation would be necessary. Usually such URIs differ from the main
resource URI in a straightforward, systematic way, allowing the variant
URI to be determined without issuing a request.


Tim Bagot

Received on Thursday, 7 August 2003 14:21:08 UTC