But what if there are side effects to calling the document? What should happen? I don't want a counter to go up or anything just because a HEAD was called on the object.
This is not as black-and-white and simple an issue.
The web is an imperfect medium, but returning a junk content type isn't good.
I'll throw out a proposal on this. It also is not perfect, but seems to strike a happier balance. When HEAD is called on an object, what currently happens is: if a 'content_type' attribute exists, it is used else if the object's id seems to have a file extension (. in the id), try to use guess_content_type else fall back to the hated application/octet-stream (or, I've seen x-unknown-content-type used before, but I don't know if this is really any better). What if we change this to: if a 'content_type' attribute exists, it is used else if the object's id seems to have a file extension (. in the id), try to use guess_content_type
else if there is a 'default_content_type' attribute, use that
else fall back to the hated application/octet-stream (or, I've seen x-unknown-content-type used before, but I don't know if this is really any better). Then we could put a 'default_content_type' attribute in the class of dtml documents and methods, which would take care of the most common case. Thoughts? Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com