Imagine going to buy your morning coffee and being told by the vendor "I only make expresso and tea".  But "I want a Latte" you say. She says "I could make a Latte but then I'd have to make a Latte for everyone".  She doesn't sound very flexible and neither is the way Domino traditionally handles the HTTP Header Content-Type.

 

When a client makes an HTTP request the Content-Type HTTP Header is sent from server to client with the response telling the client what kind of resource is being sent.

The content-type header is related to the ACCEPT header which is sent to the server with a request and tells the server what kind of content the client can accept.

Currently Domino Pages and Forms allow the designer to specify the following Content-Type options: Notes, HTML or Other (which a text field).  Alternatively Domino has a @SetHTTPHeader function but when used to set Content-Type the value seems to be overwritten by the form property.

Being able to compute the Content-Type based on the ACCEPT header would be useful where a client may be a full-fat or microbrowser.

Potential values of Content-Type for an HTML page might include:

application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml
application/xhtml+xml
text/html

It's possible to dynamically generate the header in other webservers that for example use PHP or JSP

I would like to be able to set the Content-Type programatically either by making the content-type form property computable or giving the @SetHTTPHeader precedence over the form property.

It may be possible to reproduce this functionality with xPages but it would be useful to have this in the 8.0.x code stream.

 

What do you think, am I missing a trick somewhere?