Second, a clarification: IMHO Dan's suggestion - providing a content-type
attribute on link anchors - may be useful in some applications, not
necessarily involving Mosaic clients and/or http servers; and there may be a
need to "negotiate" or choose among multiple file formats, as with http.
Third, an example of such an application: assembling and filtering documents
to create portable viewing collections, with diverse input file formats, and
diverse output formats for diverse viewing engines.
I'm looking for a better way to figure out the content type of a link than
to check the pathname.
If content type is specified as an attribute on link anchors -- hardwired at
document creation time, or even computed when processing HTML, e.g. using
marked sections -- I can do things like run the right filters on the right
files and annotate menus to alert the user to the file format.
This doesn't really have anything at all to do with http... unless I want to
recast this (completely hypothetical :) application as an http client. (!)
Again, I'm sorry my original message was not clear.
-kmc