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Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2011 09:49:03 +0000
From: Alistair Miles <alimanfoo@googlemail.com>
To: user@abdera.apache.org
Cc: atombeat@googlegroups.com
Subject: abdera client default accept header
Message-ID: <20110121094903.GB2802@aliman-desktop>
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User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14)

Hi abdera folks,

Not sure if this is important, but I was doing some work on implementing
server-driven conneg for an atom protocol implementation yesterday and
noticed that the default accept header sent by abdera client 1.1.1...

application/atom+xml;type=entry, application/atom+xml;type=feed, application/atom+xml, application/atomsvc+xml, application/atomcat+xml, application/xml, text/xml, */*

...could probably do with some quality values.

As it is, because there are no q-values, if the server has a slight preference
for anything other than atom, then the abdera client will *not* get atom, because
of the catch-all "*/*". Dealing with this kind of accept header requires the
server to fiddle q-values as described in the apache server conneg docs [1].

While many servers implementing conneg will probably fiddle quality scores
as per apache, abdera client might better send an accept header like:

application/atom+xml;type=entry; q=1.0, application/atom+xml;type=feed; q=1.0, application/atom+xml; q=1.0, application/atomsvc+xml; q=1.0, application/atomcat+xml; q=1.0, application/xml; q=0.5, text/xml; q=0.5, */*; q=0.01

Cheers, keep up the great work.

Alistair

[1] http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/content-negotiation.html#better

-- 
Alistair Miles
Head of Epidemiological Informatics
Centre for Genomics and Global Health <http://cggh.org>
The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics
Roosevelt Drive
Oxford
OX3 7BN
United Kingdom
Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
Email: alimanfoo@gmail.com
Tel: +44 (0)1865 287669