A CC / PP aware Apache Web Server

While current Internet is looking for standards that it can be based and grown upon them in a stable manner, different protocols have been suggested by several consortiums and groups. The Internet of the future will likely contain not only the standard PCs and portable computers but many other devices as well. We have already seen the mobile phones that are trying to access the world of Internet despite their limited capabilities in power and size. In order for such mobile devices to access the Internet a new protocol must be used. The weaknesses mentioned, about the low power and limited size that such devices may have forced us to treat them in a different way depending on their capabilities. This can be explained by the following example. When a PC (a client) is requesting a web server for a web document the web server will return that document. When another device with some different capabilities (mobile) is requesting the same document as in the previous case the interaction between the client and the server should not be the same. Suppose that the web document contains large images. In the first case, the computer has a screen capable of presenting such images. In the latter case however, the mobile phone has a much smaller screen incapable of handling those large images. Such devices need to be integrated with the current Internet in a way that they receive the best result depending on their capabilities. For that reason, we need a protocol that will take care of the interaction between clients and servers and make servers 'recognize' the kind and the capabilities of the client of each incoming request. Such protocol, that could provide the web servers with the information of what kind of client performs a request each time, is the new CC/PP (Composite Capabilities/Preferences Profiles) protocol. This protocol is suggested as a standard from the W3C group [WWW] ( http://www.w3c.org ).