Re: Microsoft IE -- it just gets better and better (fwd)

At 10:43 am 1/27/96 -0700, M. Hedlund spake:
>At 12:37 AM 1/27/96, BearHeart / Bill Weinman wrote:
>>At 10:11 pm 1/26/96 -0800, Brian Behlendorf spake:
>>>Maybe we should thank Microsoft for pointing out how silly and utterly
>>>useless User-Agent is for content negotiation.  [...]
>>   User-Agent may not be the most technologically whiz-bang thing
>>you can think of for content-negotiation, but it works.

>Brian is at a WWW standards meeting in Boston right now (oh, the irony),
>and therefore can't respond.  Allow me.

>He is one of the people you claim he is insulting.

   I realized that after I sent it. Ironic, isn't it?

[humble pie mode]

  NOTE TO BRIAN: I apologized for loosing my head with your comment. 
    I recognize now that you are one of the very people I was defending. 

    I also realize that my message was not clear: I was trying to 
    say that someone, sometime, thought up the User-Agent identifier; 
    and, while it may not be everything we need, it is useful for 
    something--to call it "useless" is personally insulting to that 
    somebody. 

[/humble pie]

>User-agent negotiation _does not_ work.  Some feature X is implemented in
>User-Agent Y. The erroneous assumption made by user-agent negotiation is
>that all browsers not-Y do not have feature X.  Microsoft, implementing

   True, but it's what we have--and it works better than any 
other facility currently at my disposal. My only point here is 
"Don't break it for what usefulness it has," MS's spoofing does 
break it beyond any usefulness. 

   As long as they had the "MSIE" in the string, it was fine.  And 
they are mostly Moz/1.22 compatible--that's fine to. But they bumped 
it to 2.0b3, without adding the additional functionality, and took 
out any way of identifying the distinction. That breaks the system--
and it has no purpose that I can see beyond abject content-terrorism. 

   [snip!--stuff that I've already responded to elsewhere]

>[1] Another solution would be to devise a conditional HTML system that
>allowed the browser to make rendering choices based on feature-identifiers.

   This is the last missing piece, really. The http-wg group is 
working on making the content/quality-negotiation information available. 
This piece would make it possible for me to code my content such that 
it will actually serve the proper content to the proper browsers without 
my having to generate all my HTML on-the-fly. This is a Very Good Thing! 

>[2] I received mail after my last message saying the MSIE 2.0B for Mac does
>indeed render server-pushes.  If this is the case, my apologies for the
>error.  I tested MSIE on <URL:http://www.levi.com/menu.nhtml> and got a
>bunch of broken-image icons.

   Isn't that page suave? ;^)

   Would you do me a favor and try it on my Server-Push example page? I 
don't have access to a Mac and I'd love to be able to tell my readers 
if it works or not. 

   URL: http://www.bearnet.com/cgibook/chap09/push-pl.html

   Source Code: http://www.bearnet.com/cgibook/chap09/nph-push.pl.html

   TIA.


+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| BearHeart / Bill Weinman | BearHeart@bearnet.com | http://www.bearnet.com/ 
| Author of The CGI Book -- http://www.bearnet.com/cgibook/

Received on Saturday, 27 January 1996 15:49:43 UTC