Re: Deploying new versions [Was: Versioning HTML at the

Marc VanHeyningen ([email protected])
Sun, 30 Oct 1994 21:31:39 -0500


[ This barfed and died on my previous attempts to send it to the
www-talk list, here goes again... ]

> Thirdly, if I create some HTML 3 documents and put them on my server,
> which I intend to do, if I get my server to spit out
>
> Content-type: text/html; version=3.0
>
> will this break anything? Will it offend anyone? Will it help anyone?

This will break almost all existing clients. Most of them are not smart
enough to parse content-types according to MIME rules but will simply
determine that "text/html; version=2.0" is not a recognized content-type
and prompt the user to save the result in a file.

Of those clients I have handy, Mosaic 2.5b for X, Netscape 0.9b for X, and
Lynx 2.3b all do this. Only Arena 0.91b does the right thing.

If you want to test this, a simple file with that content-type is
available at <http://www.cs.indiana.edu/test.params>.

It's a pity, because it's obviously the right way to provide versioning
information but existing software won't work with it.

--
Marc VanHeyningen  <http://www.cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/mvanheyn.html>