Re: Versioning HTML at the server and Accept-inline

David Koblas (koblas@netcom.com)
Fri, 28 Oct 1994 03:41:00 +0100

> Chris Wilson writes:
> > Tony Sanders writes:
> > >Kee Hinckley writes:
> > >> o Accept-inline:
> > >No need. The browser should simply send the appropriate standard Accept:
> > >headers when it requests the inline data.
> >
> > Not true. Take, for example, the instance where I have an external viewer
> > for Targa images, but my browser can't handle them internally (or I don't
> > want it to, since Targa images tend to be large - perhaps I only want to
> > allow GIFs.)
>
> Yes, but your browser knows prior to making the request whether or not it
> intends to display the result inline or externally, and can generate
> different Accept: headers appropriately.
>
> (Conversely, if you use Accept-inline, how the heck is the server supposed
> to know whether you're fetching the given object as an inline or an external
> image?)

Because one of the places this would be used would be in generating the
source HTML document, not retrieving the data. I don't care if you can
inline PostScript or not, nor am I likely to do anything about it. If
your browser said:
Accept-Inline: jpeg, type=color
I could send you a reference to the BEST version of that object I had.

One would dynamically generate a differnt document based on what your
browser supports. Infact I already do this for some of my documents,
based on some information I know about the 'User-Agent:' headers.

--koblas@netcom.com