(no subject)

Brian Behlendorf (brian@organic.com)
Tue, 27 Jun 1995 11:34:25 -0700 (PDT)

On Tue, 27 Jun 1995 www-html-request@www10.w3.org wrote:
> How about extending the Accept header to pass this information.
...
> Accept: image/png; q=0.8; colordepth=8, image/png; q=0.7
>
> which would be interpreted as: "if you have an 8 bit colour PNG, send it;
> otherwise send me any PNG you have".

So by what mechanism should the server determine arbitrary,
non-meta-informational attributes of the files it has available to serve,
without have to code up a lot of content-type-specific smarts into the server
itself? I.e., if a request on the file similar to the unix command "file"
returned a attribute/value pair listing, then maybe that would work, but
that's not something every content-type has natively.

Also, Accept: doesn't have any way to express the statement "send me a
PNG of the *lowest* bitdepth you have, please" - we'll need that unless
we can assume that a given "level" of a document also implies
compatibility with earlier levels.

In general, though, I think this kind of fine-tune negotiation should
occur as *close* to the client as possible - so that if three people
behind the Hensa proxy cache want different bitdepths of the same image,
hensa can download the canonical version of the image and downconvert
accordingly if it wants, rather than store three different versions.

Brian

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