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From: koblas@netcom.com (David Koblas)
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 1994 11:12:24 -0700
Subject: Re: Format Negociation in Practice [Was: Versioning HTML at the server]
I quickly see the discussion on feature support and "quality" control
degrading into two camps.
Camp A) All the work should be done by the server.
Specify in HTTP and generate/load the best matching
document.
Camp B) All the work should be done in the client.
Specify in HTML and display the right document.
I'm in favor of 'A' since it is easier to write a "simple" document
and one that does everything you want (ie. tables can be a <PRE> or
a <TABLE>, but it is easy to write)
Instead of shipping over a document that has 31 differnt variations
of the information inside of it based on what capabilites a client
can support. It is trivial to write a "meta" langauge that a server
can assemble a document from given a set of needs.
Plus the MIME information pretty much requires that a server
pick the right document anyway (ie. language or Accept:). It's just
that very few servers have done anything about picking good documents.
--koblas@homepages.com
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