[Bug 15380] Define a User-Agent string format subset (liason witth HTTP people etc)

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=15380

--- Comment #5 from Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> 2012-01-03 13:13:46 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #4)
> The reason I ask is that if the string still contains something UA-specific, is
> there any reason to think that the de-facto requirements for what to include in
> will now keep expanding with the ebb and flow of browser market share?

(I suppose you meant "not" and not "now")

You ask a rhetorical question. Hence it is possible that you only want to hear
the "no" that you expect.

But what can I say? I guess there is a cost to changing the UA string. May be
that is why Opera chose to "fall back" from XML to HTML, rather than adapting
to UA string format that "works", which thus would have allowed you to not take
this questionable step? Or was it because you did not look enough at that
option? At least, none of the Opera employee's postings on this topic seem to
have discussed the UA string change option (though I have no doubt that they
knew that it they could use IE's string, directly - but that was of course no
option). I don't know how long the ASP problem has lasted - probably several
years.

Now, let us assume that Opera *had* changed the UA string to something that
worked: Would you have done do so silently? Or would you have told the world?
If the UA string format was kept track of somewhere, then you could have
reported your change and your incompatibility findings to that UA string
tracker, and thereby benefited "the Web"?

There is every reason to think that such a UA string registry would not put an
end to the "development" of new UA strings. But then, that has never quite been
the purpose of such registries either. (Also, it could be that XML5 will allow
fatal errors to be handled differently.) But the registry would let us -
vendors and site/server developers - to have this important detail under
systematic scrutiny. E.g. perhaps Opera would have discovered this problem much
earlier. ANd perhaps ASP would have been fixed also ...

Btw: As is, if a web developer want to discern between GUI browsers and other
user agents, then the token 'Mozilla/\d' is the the safest, single-token. The
*important* *exception* is Opera.

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Received on Tuesday, 3 January 2012 13:15:57 UTC