Re: The type attribute and HTTP content negotiation.

[Sam Ruby <rubys@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dare Obasanjo wrote:

> How does ATOM deal with the following issue originally
> posted at http://www.dionidium.com/2003/12/atom-03 
>
> "One particular change to Atom has left us perplexed.
> Previously, Atom <link> tags contained only a
> resource's address, with no attributes, like this:
>
> <link>http://www.example.com/</link>
>
> The new format requires the type attribute, which
> lists the target document's media type, like this:
>
> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html"
> href="http://www.example.com/"/>
>
> As regular readers know, we're serving our documents
> as 'application/xhtml+xml' to browsers that support it
> and 'text/html' to those that don't. There's no way to
> tell from our Atom feed which media type your browser
> will get. As a result, we're not sure which media type
> to use in our feed's <link> tags (or if it even
> matters). Let us know what you think.". 

With conneg, you can find multiple media types in the same location. 
Stating that xhtml can be found at a given URI does not imply that one 
can not find other representations at the same location.

What a link tag says is literally "you can find THIS media type THERE". 
   This means that it would be quite valid to have multiple link 
statements with the same URI.

- Sam Ruby