Re: Browser Developers (A Plea From BrowserWatch)

M. Hedlund writes:
> 
> [this is just to Bill and Dave -- not the http list.]
> 
> On Fri, 24 Mar 1995 wmperry@spry.com wrote:
> > M. Hedlund writes:
> > > 
> > > 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
> 
> Yes, I like this even better.  My hesitation about asking that it go into
> HTTP/1.0 stems from:

> (1) my feeling that we can live without it for 1.0, and that even if we
> did ask for it in 1.0, 1.1 might be finalized before anyone other than
> Bill implements it this way :); and

  Well, I haven't looked at what Spyglass 2.0 sends, but the only browsers
I know of that send this even remotely correctly right now are Emacs-w3,
AIR Mosaic, and a beta version of netscape set to expire in 7 days.

> 	(2) deference to Roy's workload -- in addition to his effort to
> finalize HTTP/1.0 before _tomorrow_, he's also just taken on the cleanup
> of the HTML/2.0 spec.

  Roy, are you insane? :)

> I hate to say I think it's too late because I hate that sort of answer,
> but I guess I would ask that you consider the urgency of this request.  A
> conversation on the User-Agent header took place on the http-wg list just
> recently; see

> <URL:http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/current/0032.html>.

  Sorry for not perusing this beforehand...

  Since 'current practice' is so varied (invariably in the wrong direction
:), I can go one way or another.

-Bill P.

Received on Friday, 24 March 1995 13:27:11 UTC