Browser Sniffing

At the meeting in LA last week a new accessibility problem was announced
called browser sniffing.  Browser sniffing is done by a Web server to
determine what browser requested information and denying information if you
are not an approved browser.  This is a problem since many browsers used by
persons with disabilities are not "approved" by these servers.  The
practice seems to orginate by organizations (like banks) concerned about
security and limiting the site to browsers that support secure transations.
 The current method of sniffing does not really detect if a browser
supports secure transactions, it mainly just wants to know if you are
netscape navigator or microsoft explorer.  So even if your browser can
handle secure transactions, the serve will ignore the request.

Main questions for the user agent group is:
Is this an issue the user agent working group wants to deal with?
If so what do we want to do?
How many people in the current working group are familiar with this problem
and the technical issues surrounding it?

Jon

Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
1207 S. Oak Street
Champaign, IL 61820

Voice: 217-244-5870
Fax: 217-333-0248
E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu
WWW:	http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund
	http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess

Received on Monday, 30 March 1998 17:12:15 UTC