My general strategy for content negotiation is to ignore */*, since (as you mentioned), that means that the browser probably won't do the right thing. Unfortunately, most browsers don't send complete Accept, Accept-Encoding, and TE headers. I have been complaining since Netscape 2.0 that it doesn't send the MIME types supported by plug-ins, thus making it impossible for a server to tell (in a standardized way) which formats the browser can support. I suppose I'll complain again after Necko lands in Mozilla. And then there's the whole vs