Re: <PRE tab-width=4> (Thumbs Down)

Brian Behlendorf (brian@wired.com)
Sun, 29 Jan 95 02:30:06 EST

At 2:24 PM 1/27/95, Larry Masinter wrote:
>I think people are responding to the request that there be some way to
>say <A HREF="ftp://guest@host.gov/report_175"
>content-type="application/postscript"> with an irrelevant remark about
>how you wouldn't need this if the HREF were HTTP instead of FTP.
>
>The cases where "content-type" are useful are exactly the ones where
>there is no HTTP server, namely "ftp:", "file:" and (in some cases)
>"gopher:" URLs.

Another reason hinted at, though not expressed in so many words, is where
the content represented by one URL exists in more than one format, where
HTTP content negotiation is normally used to determine which file is
retreived, yet the person who built the link wants a particular version of
the file.

<A href="grad_paper" content-type="application/postscript">This is the
postscript version</a>, and <a href="grad_paper"
content-type="text/html">this is th HTML version</a>.

A better example would be one where the person making the link has no
control over the URL source, thus unable to give them different names.

Brian