HTTP Content Negotiation
Discussions center on using HTTP Accept headers, Content-Type, and content negotiation to serve different formats or versions of content, rather than relying on URL paths or other non-standard methods, often critiquing unusual HTTP use cases.
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In this specific use-case wouldn't plain old content-negotiation/accept headers work?
This suggests you just don't grok HTTP semantics.
See: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2013JanMar...
I don't follow. How does the "Accept" header factor in here?
The accept header could fix this easily if no third parties are involved
Why wouldn't this just be a new Content-Type to request?
Wouldn't this be fixed by checking Content-Type? It's only one way trip each time.
It sounds like you have a very unusual usecase for HTTP.
It's already a pretty chatty protocol; if you can support the HEAD request, why not do so and save the bandwidth?
I could be wrong, but my understanding matches yours and that, this data is not ever read back in by common HTTP clients (browsers, curl, etc.).