* in Accept-*

* in Accept, Accept-Charset and Accept-Encoding request headers is of very limited use, because:

With a qvalue higher than another value, it says "send anything in preference to something specific", which isn't useful
With a qvalue lower than another media type, it says "send a more specific value in preference to something else", which is already implied by HTTP
With a qvalue of 0, it says "don't ever send other value" -- but a server can always ignore that, because this is an optional-to-implement extension
In media types (e.g., text/*), it has been cargo culted a lot, but doesn't actually give the server information it can use.

Can we deprecate * in these headers, or at least restrict its use / give better guidance?

Discussed in Montreal; support for documenting limitations / caveats.

We can't deprecate it. We can explain when and where it isn't useful.

Explain the limited utility of *

Rearrange conneg and talk about *

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