intertwingly

It’s just data

Content negotiation? Not yet.


A number of people are adding support for HTTP content negotiation to the weblogging software. I'm not at this point.

Since I use Apache, I can get support for conneg virtually for free through the use of an 'Option +MultiViews'. Unfortunately, as I am currently set up, this only works on the level of what is currently cached statically. This could produce inconsistent results based on the order in which requests are received. Not good.

Another alternative would be to process all requests involving conneg dynamically.

I'm also concerned about the implications of this to other caches. Perhaps Aggie should have an option to turn this feature off in case someone is faced with a less than intelligent proxy which caches?

Finally, I'm skeptical about the existence of client software that can handle multiple formats (not just RSS 1.0 vs RSS 2.0, but RSS vs HTML or PDF). To do this right, the recipient should verify the content type received, and one simply can't rely on this HTTP header for RSS feeds at this point.