Re: Why Microsoft's authoritative=true won't work and is a bad idea

Dave Singer wrote:
> At 17:46  +0200 7/07/08, Julian Reschke wrote:
>>> An alternative might be to add a header "look, I guessed it" when 
>>> Apache adds a 'guessed' text/plain as the content-type, and say that 
>>> browsers might take text/plain+IGuessed as something to sniff. This 
>>> is like the proposed Microsoft header but the other way up...
>>
>> I agree that's nicer in theory. But how do we get all the existing 
>> installations to change their DefaultType?
> 
> Well, someone has already said that the IE upgrade rate is less than 
> 50%.  There are a lot more clients (browsers) than servers out there, 
> and system admins tend to be better at upgrading than users (because 
> they get security fixes along with bug fixes). 

http://philip.html5.org/data/server-versions.txt shows the versions from 
Server headers seen when downloading ~130K links from dmoz.org, about 
four months ago.

Looking at major versions of Apache:
   Apache/1.3: 33447
   Apache/2.0: 16026
   Apache/2.2: 8733

Looking at minor versions of 1.3:
   Apache/1.3.(0..9):   244
   Apache/1.3.(10..19): 532
   Apache/1.3.(20..29): 6175
   Apache/1.3.(30..39): 24932
   Apache/1.3.(40..49): 1553

Half of the Apache/1.3 servers are 1.3.34 (released October 2005) or older.

Looking at ISS, the most significant numbers are:
   Microsoft-IIS/4.0: 327
   Microsoft-IIS/5.0: 6990
   Microsoft-IIS/6.0: 22038
   Microsoft-IIS/7.0: 30

IIS/6.0 seems to have been released in 2003; about a quarter of the IIS 
servers are older than that.

In comparison, IE7 was released in October 2006, and something like a 
third to two-thirds of IE users still use IE6. Firefox 2 was released in 
March 2006, and something like 15% still use FF 1.5.

So, it doesn't seem true that web servers are upgraded much faster than 
web browsers.

-- 
Philip Taylor
pjt47@cam.ac.uk

Received on Monday, 7 July 2008 17:19:33 UTC