Risto Kankkunen wrote:

>
> Edward Lass <elass@goer.state.ny.us> wrote:
>
>>>> 1. It provides alternative representations only for remote resources
>>>
>>
>> In theory, HTTP Content Negotiation and XML encoding information 
>> should already make sure that the user agent can handle everything 
>> that an XHTML page throws at it.
>
>
> First of all, HTTP Content Negotiation works of course only when HTTP is
> used. XHTML is not meant to be used only with HTTP.
>
> Secondly, HTTP Content Negotiation, as well as the draft's mechanism,
> only works for external documents. Surely you don't mean that the author
> should prepare a number of different versions of a large document, just
> because it happens to contain a couple of phrases in a couple of
> different languages? This is just the reason we need a mechanism like
> "<alt>" that isn't tied into the external objects.
>
It would actually be better that all browser-dependant things were
managed on server side, producing documents dynamically and in case then
storing them for future requests; but at present I think a mechanism
like alt is acceptable (by the way I think it's a good proposal).