Re: Content-Type for HTML 3.

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@beach.w3.org)
Fri, 28 Jul 1995 18:19:12 -0400


In message <199507282207.QAA05513@yellow.nmt.edu>, Benjamin C. W. Sittler write
s:
>What should the content-type: header for HTML 3 be?

>text/html; level=3

This agrees with:

"Toward Graceful Deployment of Tables in HTML"
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/table-deployment.html

which is the closest thing to a spec on this issue. I have had
no negative comments on this syntax.

> Currently it uses application/x-css for
>CSS stylesheets, application/x-navistyle for NaviPress stylesheets,
>text/html for HTML 2 documents, and text/html; level=3 for HTML 3
>documents.

Sounds good.

>Also, are the MIME types in the Accept: header in any particular order
>(i.e. preference?) I couldn't find this information in the online docs...
>the reason I need to know is that I want to be able to send the client the
>file format it most wants.

Preference is indicated by the q=... parameter. I don't believe HTTP
assigns any meaning to the order of the entries in an Accept: header.
Let's check the spec and see...

5.4 Request Header Fields
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Protocols/HTTP1.0/HTTP1.0-ID_24.html
Sun Mar 12 18:36:51 1995

|The field may be folded onto several lines and more than one
|occurrence of the field is allowed (with the semantics being the same
|as if all the entries had been in one field value).
|
|Accept = "Accept" ":" 1#(
| media-range
| [ ";" "q" "=" ( "0" | "1" | float ) ]
| [ ";" "mxb" "=" 1*DIGIT ] )
|media-range = ( "*/*"
| | ( type "/" "*" )
| | ( type "/" subtype )
| ) *( ";" parameter )
|float = < ANSI-C floating point text representation,
| where (0.0 < float < 1.0) >
|
|The parameter q is used to indicate the quality factor, which
|represents the user's preference for that range of media types, and
|the parameter mxb gives the maximum acceptable size of the Entity-Body
|(in decimal number of octets) for that range of media types.

Dan