Sounds perfectly reasonable to me! If a client has disk space to
store the data into, then by all means, accept */* and allow the
user to deal with the problem offline.
If you're running in -anonymous or "kiosk" mode through a public
telnet port, however, and the server has an MPEG video, there's
no use in having it pump the data all the way across the net so
you can put it in the bitbucket (or the "black hole," as it's
called in the libwww code.)
>Further, if we move clients away from doing this type of thing, then
>should a client be asking for the head and then ask if the user wants the
>data before a full transaction? If so, shouldn't the mechanism be in libwww?
Ack! Blech! Barf! Please don't subvert the whole format negociation
paradigm!
On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with providing a "link preview"
feature, where the user ctrl-clicks on an anchor, the client does
a HEAD, and displays info about availability, size, formats, languages,
etc.
The format negociation's greatest feature is that it requires exactly
ONE round trip for any GET request.
Dan