Local and Global Request Preferences

A Request can be decorated with a set of preferences described in this section. Some of the preferences are bound to the end user, like for example the preferred natural language, and some of the preferences are reflecting the capabilities of the application, for example if it is capable of showing a postscript document to the user. The current set is

Format converters

The set of content-types that the application understands. This can for example be text/html.

Natural languages

The user's preferred set of natural langauges, for example fr for French

Content encodings

The set of content encodings that the application understands, for example gzip and compress

Character sets

The character set preferred by the user, for example us-ascii

When libwww is first started, it knows nothing about these preferences. By specifying preferences, the application can tailor libwww to fit the features supported by the application and by the end user. In the following section we will describe how the application can set up the various preferences. All preferences described in this chapter use lists to group the sets together. As we will see later in this chapter, the reason for this is that lists are an easy way of assigning specific preferences to various requests.

Adding and Deleting Format Converters

Adding and Deleting Natural Language

Adding and Deleting Content Encoders and Decoders

Adding and Deleting Character sets

Adding and Deleting Global Preferences

Adding and Deleting Lobal Preferences