Re: LYNX-DEV Maybe a bug in Lynx 2.6 or maybe a bug with the host server

[Klaus Weide]

Apologies to the list for an empty reply I sent earlier by mistake...
Let's try again...

 That server, us.imdb.com, is a HTTP 1.1 server - the first one I
encounter in real life, without looking hard for one for testing :)

(How do I know?  Just send it a HEAD request, bound to the ']' key
in Lynx.  See whether the first line starts with HTTP/1.1.)

They also use content negotiation (which is not really related to the
versio number, that feature has been around in HTTP for a long time,
but it isn't being used much). 

With regard to your message:  It's not a bug, it's a feature!

On Wed, 30 Oct 1996, Stupendous man wrote:

> I encounter the following message when I visit the following site
> http://us.imdb.com
> It does give me an option to go to a English language page. Don't know
> where the problem is. 

So you could just select one of the two links in the "Not Acceptable"
page returned, index.html.de or index.html.en, and view the page in
the language of your choice (English or German).  This works fine with
Lynx2.6, the links are "clickable".

You should not get this selection page, but rather directly go to the
requested page, if your
     preferred document lan(G)uage:
which can be set from the Options screen specifies either English or
German, with their standard two-letter codes:
     preferred document lan(G)uage: en
or
     preferred document lan(G)uage: de

You can even list several languages, with "quality factors" indicating
your preferences, like the following:
     preferred document lan(G)uage: es;q=1.0, en;q=0.5, de;q=0.1
which means, roughly, "I prefer spanish (es), but I can also accept
getting the page in English (but that would be only half as good),
or, as a last resort, getting the page in German".  The server then will
try to match your preferences with what it has available, and try to give
you the best match - the English page in my example, if the page is not
available in Spanish.  The "error message", which still allows you to
select among the available variants, should only be returned if you have
specified something as preferred language(s), but it doesn't match with
any of the variants the server has available.

Of course the interactive selection (from the "Not Acceptable" page)
can only work if you are using Lynx in interactive mode (not with -dump
or similar).  

Lynx probably shouldn't give the "Alert!" message on the status line
as it currently does for 406 responses, that gives the impression
that something is terribly wrong when it really isn't.

If someone wants to specify multiple languages they can accept on the
     preferred document lan(G)uage: 
line of Lynx's Options screen, they have to be careful to use the correct
syntax (use commas and semicolons as in my example above), Lynx currently
doesn't check it and just passes the line on the to server as specified.

   Klaus

> Error message from http://us.imdb.com using lynx
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>                                 Not Acceptable
>                                        
>    An appropriate variant to the requested entity /index.html could not
>    be found on this server.
>    
>    Available variants:
>      * index.html.de type text/html language de
>      * index.html.en type text/html language en

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