It would be great if we could hash this out once and for all, and
deploy the solution.
Format negociation is this nifty idea in theory, but in practice, we see:
"Click _here_ if you have a text-only browser."
"Click _here_ if you don't have a forms-capable browser."
"Click _here_ for postscript, _here_ for text..."
[First, I wish all the _here_'s would go away, but that's another
story altogether.]
I'd actually say that the Mcom extensions are less worrisome than tables:
if a document uses Mcom extensions, it still makes sense in existing
browsers. It looks like they were fairly careful about that.
On the other hand, if a server hands a table to a browser with no
table handling code, you get something like:
This table shows population growth: USA USSR 1000 3324
1985 1986
where the table contents gets streamed into the paragraph.
Ideally, the server would convert the table to PRE or some such.
But I don't think the technical details are the problem any more:
we have to make it easy for information providers to _use_ format
negociation.
I don't know if this means more tutorial documentation, or some
http server configuration options, or changes to clients, or what.
I have a few ideas, but I'd like to hear from other folks: how can
we clean this mess up? Or is format negociation just not gonna work?
What can we do to avoid:
"Click _here_ if your browser doesn't support tables."
"Click _here_ if your browser doesn't support multilingual docs."
"Click _here_ if your browser doesn't support figures."
"Click _here_ if your browser doesn't support math."
"Click _here_ if your browser doesn't support stylesheets."
Dan