[Catalog-sig] PKG-INFO exports?

[Kevin Turner]

On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 06:18, A.M. Kuchling wrote: 
> HTTP already has a header for this that gets passed as the
> ACCEPT_TYPES HTTP header.  So text/plain could get PKG-INFO, text/html
> would get the existing HTML, application/rdf+xml could get some future
> hypothetical RDF encoding, and so forth.

Hmm.  This is, in the bizarro W3C-universe, the right answer, if we are
in fact always publishing the same set of information and just
expressing it in different formats.  However, back here on the mortal
plane, it's much more difficult to work with than giving different URLs
to different formats.  You have to use a tool that lets you specify this
header, and that's probably not unreasonable here, but it does mean you
can't test it in your everyday browser.

Also, CacheNow! says that http caches do not "co-exist happily" with
happily with content negotiation[1].  As long as the URL has got a
".cgi?" in it that probably doesn't matter (as it's not likely to get
cached anyway), but it's another factor to consider.


[1] http://vancouver-webpages.com/CacheNow/negotiation.html

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