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Posted by Michael Winter on 08/04/06 17:50
On 04/08/2006 18:16, joshbeall@gmail.com wrote:
[snip]
> Accept||text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
> Accept-Charset||ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
> Accept-Encoding||gzip,deflate
> Accept-Language||en-us,en;q=0.5
>
> I'm curious what the q=0.5 , q=0.7 and so forth indicate.
They are referred to as "quality values" though that's a misnomer. They
indicate a relative weight, allowing the browser to specify which
content type, language, etc. is preferred. This allows the server to
choose the best possible representation (assuming there's more than one)
during content negotiation.
The values range from zero (0) to one (1), with at most three decimal
places. A value of zero means that item - character encoding, language,
whatever it may be - is not acceptable; the server should never return
something matching it. If there is no explicitly associated quality
value, it is assumed to be 1.0.
> Can someone enlighten me? Point me to a reference?
RFC 2616[1] (HTTP/1.1) is the definitive reference. Quality values are
described in section 3.9 Quality Values. HTTP headers are listed within
chapter 14 Header Field Definitions.
Mike
[1] RFC 2616 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt>
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