On Sep 4, J.G.Harston inscribed on the eternal scroll:

> Until I host my site on a server that knows about the RISC OS
> metadata, the server won't know about the metadata, and so won't send
> it in an HTTP header.

This is a non-sequitur.  Servers don't have to "know about"
Content-types explicitly; they just need to have a way for you to
define them.  (For Apache, that could conveniently be AddType headers
in your .htaccess file.)

However, if you want to go into that in any detail, you'd need to move
to a group which deals with the appropriate kind of web server; or
maybe to the support forum which deals with your particular service
provider.  It can't hurt to try, anyway.  To broaden the scope of
something that Mark Nottingham says elsewhere:

    * If your site is hosted at an ISP or hosting farm and they don't
 give you the ability to set arbitrary HTTP headers (like Expires and
 Cache-Control), complain loudly; these are tools necessary for doing
 your job.

This applies even more strongly to HTTP Content-type, I'd say.

> Until then, href
> links in documents on my site that point to files that have RISC OS
> metadata having a specified content type will allow user agents that
> understand it to use the supplied metadata.

Can't argue with that as a theoretical principle; but do you know of
any such user agents?  I guess this is only an issue when you're
dealing with RISC OS -based browsers.  As I'm not familiar with those,
I'd have to stick to generalities at that point in the discussion,
sorry.

cheers

-- 
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                           Q: What is the most irritating thing on Usenet?
                                           - "Gordon" on apihna

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Alan J. Flavell wrote:
[snip]
>     * If your site is hosted at an ISP or hosting farm and they don't
>  give you the ability to set arbitrary HTTP headers (like Expires and
>  Cache-Control), complain loudly; these are tools necessary for doing
>  your job.
[snip]

Any tips on dealing with hosts that say "well we can't compile in the 
expires module, as recompiling apache would void our warranty" (about a RaQ 
XTR)?  Hopefully something other than "move isp" or playing with a rewrite 
rule & php script.


-- 
Jim Dabell

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On Sep 4, Jim Dabell inscribed on the eternal scroll:

> Any tips on dealing with hosts that say "well we can't compile in the
> expires module, as recompiling apache would void our warranty"

Sounds pretty lame to me.

> (about a RaQ XTR)?

This is the wrong forum, and I know squat about raqs, but google shows
pages saying they support dso, so dynamic loading _should_ be an
option, if that remark about "compiling-in" can be taken literally.

On the other hand, "Header add ..." doesn't need mod_expires, and
should be able to add an Expires header, although it doesn't have the
flexibility of computing expiry dates which mod_expires offers.

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