Re: Negotiation patch: is this result normal?

["Roy T. Fielding" <fi...@kiwi.ics.uci.edu>]

>So far everything's just perfect (*much* better than before, thanks!).
>But when I now add a configuration directive...
>  # "anonymous" default variants are linked to english
>  <Files index.shtml.shtml>
>   DefaultLanguage en
>  </Files>
>then the response to the same request suddenly changes: it appears to be
>no longer negotiated, and the time stamp shows me the german variant was
>selected. Why is that? Is it a bug? Or is it normal (because now the
>"anonymous" variant is no longer anonymous but english, and is therefore
>ruled out in the selection algorithm)?
>
>> echo HEAD http://dcwww.mch.sni.de/ HTTP/1.0\nAccept-Language: xy\n | netcat 
>proxy 81
>HTTP/1.0 200 OK
>Date: Fri, 01 Jan 1999 18:53:22 GMT
>Server: Apache/1.3.4-dev (BS2000) PHP/3.0.5
>Last-Modified: Wed, 23 Dec 1998 07:53:17 GMT
>ETag: "7-1150-3680a16d;3647d86b"
>Accept-Ranges: bytes
>Content-Length: 4432
>Content-Type: text/html

IIRC, if the list of acceptable languages is given and none of the variants
have that language, then we have the option of either returning 406 or
responding with whatever we think the client really wants to see.  We have
so far stuck with the latter because the *&%%$ browsers have yet to
implement Accept-Language in a way that is obvious for the user to
configure correctly.  What we should be doing in this situation is sending
the Alternates field, since it makes sense to burn the bytes in a situation
where the client needs a clue.

....Roy