Harald,
1. Thanks for the proposal.
2. The HTTP protocol (ID should have come out in July but
sorry it got lost, now in the pipeline, and available as
ftp://info.cern.ch/www/doc/http-spec.{ps,txt}) has a
bunch of extended metainformation needed by WWW when
it returns things from or send things to a real time
(as opposed to mail) server.
WWW as you may know uses MIME messages as protocol
data units (kinda), but with extenstions.
3. The HTTP spec includes a "Language:" field, with basically
the same spec as Content-Language:.
Can I ask why the "Content-"? The metainformation in
RFC822 headers always applies to the message, not to the
header. Is this a little like putting lables on the
jelly jar, "Jelly Jar" or "Jelly Jar Label" instead of simply
"Jelly"?
4. The HTTP protocol also addresses the question of variants,
including currently Language:, Content-Type:, and
Version. There is a mecahnism for the client to
say what content-type and languge he can accept, and there
is a mechanism to say, in a URI which is given for an
object, in which dimensions variants of the object are
still refered to by the URI.
I have jsut sent aorund a message about tying all this
togther whoich provides a way for a first alternate part to
give (using URI fields which refer to content-identifiers)
the relationships between the alternate parts.
Tim BL