Re: Client Compliance

Nick Williams (njw@cs.city.ac.uk)
Tue, 6 Sep 1994 09:09:07 +0200

Excerpts from www.talk: 6-Sep-94 Re: Client Compliance Rick
Troth@UA1VM.UA.EDU (733*)

> > I remember hearing something about a web server from CMU
> >that allowed you to do a:
> >
> >GET /some/image/path HTTP/1.0
> >Accept: image/jpeg
> >Accept: image/gif
> >
> >And it would look for path.jpg, then path.gif.
> >
> >Does anybody have a pointer to this web server, or the web server author?

The 'deceit' web-server does this at the moment: any filename extension
is is ALWAYS ignored, by stripping it off the input URL. Then the
Accept formats are used to look for the correctly typed object. In an
original version of the server, it would also use the Accept formats to
attempt a conversion path into the most desired object. Unfortunately,
without quality info being sent, this could mean that images would be
appearing as ascii-art and so this is no longer enabled in the server.

Check out the "Tangled Web of Deceit" paper from WWW94.

Nick Williams, Systems Architecture Research Centre, City University,
London, EC1V 0HB. UK.

Web: http://web.cs.city.ac.uk/finger?njw
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