On 15 Jun 2010, at 11:24, Nick wrote:

Quoth Ethan Grammatikidis:
I think it's pointless because most file types can be identified
from  their first few bytes. This loops back around to my
content-type  argument, why should the server go looking for file
type when the  client gets it handed to it anyway?

Because that way you can do content negotiation. Granted, that isn't
much used today,

Why not? With more international businesses than ever on the web and the internet spread further over the globe than ever before, and with content negotiation having been around for such a long time, why is it hardly used? Perhaps because it sucks?

and it would make sense to make content-type
optional, but I like the idea of content negotiation. Being able to
e.g. get the original markdown for the content of a page, without
the HTML crap, navigation etc, would be really nice in a lot of
cases.

Maybe, but I doubt the majority of web designers would like you looking at their source, as simple as it might be, and the likelihood of big businesses letting you get at their web page sources seems very low. Maybe I'm just terminally cynical.

I get the impression the W3C expected content negotiation to
be used a lot more when they wrote the HTTP 1.1 spec.

Erm, yeah. The W3C seems to have expected a lot of things would be practical and useful.

--
Complexity is not a function of the number of features. Some features exist only because complexity was _removed_ from the underlying system.


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