Re: Toward Graceful Deployment of Tables

M. Hedlund (march@europa.com)
Wed, 15 Mar 1995 23:14:44 -0800

+--- Dan Connolly wrote:
>Format Negociation
[...]
> To account for this, the primary web information retrieval protocol,
> HTTP[5], supports format negociation[6], where the client advertises
> its capabilities and preferences regarding data formats, and the server
> tunes its response to these preferences.
[...]
> Client implementors are encouraged to support the full HTML 3.0
> specification, and announce this in each request ala:
>
> Accept: text/html; level=3

Can this be stated more strongly? Without a strong advisory that clients
designate acceptance of tables, and without uniform implementation,
globbing in the Accept header will make partial implementation next to
useless. The HTTP protocol encourages the use of "Accept: */*" to allow
clients to download unknown types.

> HTML 2.5, i.e. 2.0 + tables?
> Should we suggest that browser implementors who
> wish to support tables, but not the rest of
>the 3.0
> spec should specify level=2.5 in their Accept:
> headers?

I would definitely prefer this to nothing at all. Again, if this could be
strongly suggested and widely implemented, the Accept header would be more
useful.

M. Hedlund <march@europa.com>