Re: conneg considered harmful

first, i find it instructive that the thread you cite started with an
effort to register a media type that had a version number in the identifier!

second, it's not clear to me whether Larry is apologizing for the conneg
implementation details or the concept of conneg itself. and i see nothing
here regarding client-driven conneg,

FWIW, HTTP is the only app-level protocol that provides the ability to
negotiation for representation details including media type, charset,
language, encoding, and even ranges. No doubt some have proved more
effective than others. I think the ability to negotiate
for representations is an important part of the spec and while i'm open to
new ways to implement the feature, i don't think it wise to drop it.

as for "deprecating" as LM mentions, there is no such thing on "the Web."
once spec'd it will always remain. we can discourage the use of some aspect
of the spec, but removing it is neither advisable or likely.

BTW - i'd be happy to see user-agents support client-driven negotiation. i
used to think this meant common browsers MUST be the leaders for a feature
like this. but recently i've started to think that native-built mobile
clients could start to turn the tide on what features show up in the
pipeline.

Cheers.
mamund
+1.859.757.1449
skype: mca.amundsen
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On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Darrel Miller <[email protected]>wrote:

>
>
> For the record, here is a link [1] to Larry Masinter's apology for pushing
> accept header based conneg and his suggestion that it be deprecated.  It is
> sad that this email is from 2006 and yet here we are still...
>
>  Darrel
>
> [1] http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-types/2006-April/001707.html
>
>
> 
>