Re: Tables and non-table-able browsers

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@beach.w3.org)
Thu, 10 Aug 1995 09:17:44 -0400

In message <199508100231.DAA00726@heffer.demon.co.uk>, R J Partington writes:
>I've got a document which has a table in it. (This is just on my
>local machine at the moment).
>
>Can I, and if so - how, deliver different versions of the document
>to different browsers so that netscape/arena etc. get a version
>with a <table> in, and others get a <pre>-formatted asciified
>version of the table?

Yes, you can. The protocol for doing this is defined:

HTTP Working Group T. Berners-Lee, MIT/W3C
INTERNET-DRAFT R. Fielding, UC Irvine
<draft-ietf-http-v10-spec-01.ps> H. Nielsen, MIT/W3C
Expires February 3, 1996 August 3, 1995

http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Protocols/HTTP1.0/draft-ietf-http-spec.html#Negotiation

The strategy for graceful deployment of tables is given in:

HTML: Table Deployment Strategy
$Id: table-deployment.html,v 1.2 1995/03/13 23:01:39 connolly Exp $
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/table-deployment.html

As to how, see:

Suffix Definitions for CERN httpd
Ari Luotonen, CERN, 1994
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/User/Config/Suffixes.html#AddType

Apache server Content arbitration: MultiViews and *.var files
http://www.apache.org/docs/content-negotiation.html
Mon Aug 7 07:22:30 1995

Would somebody do the world a favor and write this up as
a WWW FAQ entry and send it to Thomas Boutell?

Daniel W. Connolly "We believe in the interconnectedness of all things"
Research Scientist, MIT/W3C PGP: EDF8 A8E4 F3BB 0F3C FD1B 7BE0 716C FF21
<connolly@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/People/Connolly