Re: Toward Graceful Deployment of Tables

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Wed, 15 Mar 1995 03:47:34 -0500

>> Any major upgrade of any systems will bring support nightmare in terms of
>> compatibility issue. You think provide different versions of documents via
>> a format negotiation is less nighmarish? I don't think so.
>
>It is, particularly when one (HTML 2.0) can be generated from another
>(HTML 3.0), and that generation happens via scripts, a publishing/CVS
>system, or within the server itself though I would prefer the first or
>second method. Thus, you can just edit in HTML 3.0 and all is well - I
>bet you could even write a HTML 3.0 -> MozillaHTML script converting the
>style sheet info into per-tag attributes.

While DynaWeb currently does not support full content negotiation, it
generates HTML from arbitrary SGML via stylesheets. It is possible
for the user to specify different stylesheets, and thereby change the
generated HTML (yet another problem for caching documents: the same
URL might have any number of possible HTML pages). Given such
mechanisms, it certainly seems feasible to support various levels of
HTML by looking at the Accept: headers.