- From: Frank Ellermann <nobody@xyzzy.claranet.de>
- Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:56:37 +0200
- To: www-validator@w3.org
olivier Thereaux wrote: >> Sounds good, I hope "forward" covers "no UA" [...] >> Maybe you need to map an empty "other string" to "no UA". [...] > I hadn't thought much about "no UA". To me it is usually > not a good idea to not have a UA header at all - that's > the prerogative of broken bots - should we really have > that? UA is a SHOULD in HTTP, so there might be valid reasons to have no UA header field at all. But I've no idea what an *empty* UA field should do, the syntax doesn't permit this. > This makes me think maybe when a UA is requested we should > use that custom of adding a (Compatible; W3C Markup > Validator <version)) ? Certainly allowed by the syntax. But I thought the idea is to check what the server does with the "real" UA. A server looking for say "mozilla/3.0 (OS/2 U)" or similar could be confused by embellishments added by the validator. Only a wild guess. The concept of server behaviour depending on the UA string makes me nervous, unless it's about desperate attempts to identify broken UAs. Frank
Received on Thursday, 19 June 2008 05:55:30 UTC