First off, thanks for a good service.

I have been trying out the REST web service and encountered some odd behaviour. When I query the API with no Accept header set, the response sometimes contains xml, sometimes json, seemingly at random. I have tried artist lookups and search. Same thing happens in Internet Explorer (11.674.15063.0), but not in Chrome (61.0.3163.100), but that may be due to caching.

Try this URL: https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/?query=Peter%20Gabriel

Setting the Accept header or adding "fmt=x" to the query fixes this, so it is not a big deal, but it got me wondering if this is intended/desired behaviour? I was under the impression that XML would be default.

I can provide example Java code if necessary.