- From: <bugzilla@jessica.w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:31:08 +0000
- To: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=15380 --- Comment #7 from Philip J <philipj@opera.com> 2012-01-03 13:31:07 UTC --- (In reply to comment #5) > (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") Right. > You ask a rhetorical question. Hence it is possible that you only want to hear > the "no" that you expect. Actually, I was interested to hear everyone's opinions on this. Specifying part of the UA string is obviously better than specifying none of it, but is it too far-fetched to suggest that all of it be specified? There are downsides of course, but imagine to remove this source of incompatibilities forever! > 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. I wasn't at all involved, but my guess is that everyone knows that changing the UA string *at all* is guaranteed to cause compat issues somewhere, so it's not exactly a safe way to fix compat issues elsewhere. > 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 ... I agree 100%, the more of the UA string that is specified the better for the Web in general and small players in particular. > 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. Huh, I did not know that, but I'm guessing that there's some historical reason for why Mozilla/0 is not part of our UA. It seems likely that adding it now would cause all kinds of things to break, but perhaps it would fix some as well.. -- Configure bugmail: https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the QA contact for the bug.
Received on Tuesday, 3 January 2012 13:31:15 UTC