- From: <wmperry@spry.com>
- Date: Fri, 24 Mar 95 11:23 PST
- To: "M. Hedlund" <march@europa.com>
- Cc: Dave Garaffa <d-garaffa@ski.mskcc.org>, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
M. Hedlund writes:
>
> On Fri, 24 Mar 1995 wmperry@spry.com wrote:
> > Shouldn't the User-Agent field follow 'normal' specs for headers and do
> > something like:
> >
> > User-Agent: agent=NCSA Mosaic/2.0.0b1 ; platform=Macintosh/680x0
> > library=WWWLib/3.0.x ; other=Whatever
> >
> > This would make it a little easier for people like Dave to parse the
> > string, without having to worry about order of the arguments, etc. Plus
> > this would allow whitespace (but not ;) in the specifier.
>
> Yes, I like Bill's proposal and I've suggested platform in the user-agent
> field before. This would, however, completely break current systems
> (which tend to look for the text before the first / as user-agent name,
> and can survive miscreant whitespace) that currently work with HTTP/1.0
> requests. Can we defer this to 1.1?
Perhaps we could combine the two?
User-Agent: NCSA Mosaic/2.0.0b1 ; platform=Macintosh/680x0 ;
library=WWWLib/3.0.x ; other=Whatever
This would still let old services that look for whatever is before the
first / to still get the same results. And actually is more MIME-y than my
first one, since the platform=xxxx, can now be considered
parameters/extensions to the base 'NCSA Mosaic' value.
-Bill P.
Received on Friday, 24 March 1995 12:36:30 UTC