At 08:55 AM 7/13/02 -0700, ned(_dot_)freed(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com wrote:
I think the availabilty of capabilities information has the potential to be as
important a step as MIME was. As such, I don't begrudge healthy debate about
how and where it is done. But let's not forget that the development of
MIME was
informed by the catastrophic failure of various other schemes for doing
multimedia messaging -- some of them more elegant than MIME -- leading to
compromises in the design intended to insure deployability. I think the
discussion of where and how to do content negotiation needs to be similarly
informed by the catastrophic failure of Internet-wide directory services to
deploy.
(Not to disagree with anything you say...)
One of the considerations informing the UA-driven negotiation design was
the idea that information obtained from any source other than the final
recipient was potentially tentative, and that some kind of closing of the
loop was needed to make negotiation reliable. The better the initial
information that is available, the more efficient the
negotiate-and-transfer process (one round trip). But incorrect initial
information doesn't cause the transfer to fail (except possibly for reasons
of timing).
#g
-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK(_at_)NineByNine(_dot_)org>