On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote: > If it's an element of the Accept-* negotiation, it needs to be > multiview-matched. If it isn't, it has no business in there. > > If you disagree with the above sentence, let's narrow the argument to > that statement. >
I've only read this thread very quickly (just catching up on mail), but let me reiterate a point that I believe has been mentioned briefly: Multiviews has two purposes in 1.3: It can be used for negotiated documents, or it can be used to hide implementation details. The first part is obvious. To be specific about the second part, the idea is: 1. File extensions are a convenient way to store/configure meta-information about resources. 2. The URLs do not need to contain this meta-information, and in fact often SHOULD NOT contain it. For example, the URL may be http://example.com/info This may start off as info.html, but later an ssi document is substituted so it becomes info.shtml, and later the url is changed so info.asis is substituted. The client doesn't care about all this garbage, since it can just request /info and get the correct thing. Yes, it is bogus that a selection can be made based on length. It is a configuration error to put have two different files which may be selected by multi-views but are not "negotiable" with the client. Either an error could be returned, or we could just document that the selection is arbitrary in that case. Joshua.
