Re: HTTP ACCEPT field and MIME types

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Date: Wed, 2 Jun 93 18:16:33 +0100
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Message-id: <9306021716.AA01622@www3.cern.ch>
To: weber@eitech.com (Jay Weber)
Subject: Re: HTTP ACCEPT field and MIME types
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Reply-To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch

Jay,

A good point about the commas in the Accept: field.  I hadn't noticed  
that MIME qualified the type with parameters sometimes.  It seems  
there is something strange in the example you give

                 Content-Type:  application/octet-stream;
                      name=foo.tar.Z; type=tar;
                      conversions="x-encrypt,x-compress"

that means that the MIME typing isn't coping -- in particular here  
the content-encoding field isn't coping.

There are several TBC areas in the latest version (any version) which
need to be filled in before its an RFC.  (An ID first maybe). And  
there must of course be working implementations. The libwww uses
the Accept: field. It in fact sends one field per content-type.
It's not obvious how to distinguish between w3 parameters and MIME
parameters to a type.  Maybe we don't have to.

request:
	Accept: image/gif; q=0.8; width=1200; height=100; colous=256;
response:
	Content-Type: image/gif; width=800; height=400; colours=10;
	
Tim