Content Negotiation

[Brian Frank <brian.tridium@gmail.com>]

Reading thru the HTTP spec it was a little unclear to me when to use 406 for 415 status codes.  But here is what I came up with regarding content negotiation.  Feedback welcome.

Contention Negotiation

oBIX resources may be encoded using either the “text/xml“ or the “application/x-obix-binary“ MIME types.  Clients and servers SHOULD follow Section 12 of RFC 2616 for content negotiation.

 

If a client wishes to GET a resource using a specific encoding, then it SHOULD specify the desired MIME type in the Accept header.

 

If the server does not support the MIME type of a client request, then it SHOULD respond with the 406 Not Acceptable status code.  There are two use cases for a 406 failure: 1) the client specifies an unsupported MIME type in the Accept header of a GET (read) request, or 2) the client specifies an unsupported MIME type in the Content-Type of a PUT (write) or POST (invoke) request.