Re: An MGET proposal for HTTP

Chris Lilley, Computer Graphics Unit (lilley@v5.cgu.mcc.ac.uk)
Thu, 3 Nov 1994 01:05:16 +0100

Guy Decoux wanted to know:

> 1) Why Lynx, Mosaic, Netscape, www ... send always a field "Accept:
> image/gif" in the first request, even if the user don't want receive a GIF
> image.

Because they are broken, but up till now that didn't matter much in practice

> 2) why, in the example of "MGET", in the first request there is only
> "text/html; text/plain" and then a request with "image/gif". For me there
> is no negociation between the server and the client. Perhaps it's better to
> make the choice of Chimera and send "Accept: */*"

Because they try not to be broken, and only ask for what is sensible for that
request rather than sending the same Accept headers with every request. After
all, if my client has asked for a document, sending text/html is necessary and
text/plain seems to be conventional but chemical/pdb is probably superfluous.

I mention the latter because Arena, having read my mailcap, sends that out when
it asks for html documents, etc.

> 3) why Netscape never send a field "Accept: application/postscript" even
>if the user want receive a PostScript document.

Because it is broken, but up till now that didn't matter much in practice

--
Chris