Re: action-231, issue-153 requirements on other software that sets DNT headers

On Aug 22, 2012, at 8:09 PM, Justin Brookman wrote:

> It is simply not true that IE10's header has no meaning.

According to their docs, it is not consistent with DNT as defined
in our specs.  It therefore has no meaning known to me.  That is
the nature of open standards.

>   At the end of the day, for implementers of this specification, IE10's DNT:1 header meaning is whatever this spec says it is.

No, IE10's DNT is just a bug. A brain fart of epic proportions.
IE has had many bugs over the years, they occasionally get fixed,
and most people have learned to avoid the n.0 releases.

>   The problem comes if the spec says that any party gets to subjectively decide what IE10's header means.

I have no desire for the spec to say that.  I have a desire to
tell the user that they have a buggy UA without messing with
the site UI.  If the WG doesn't want me to do that, then the
user gets a little less transparency.

Regardless, MSIE 10.0's DNT signal will be deleted before any
application or downstream server sees it.

> To forestall having the same exact argument with you for the nth time, I will reiterate my concession that it may be OK for parties to have different rules for responding to different UAs (including refusing to provide content).  I'm just not sure a response header to the UA that "I refuse to honor this header" without requiring more is sufficiently transparent from the user's persepctive.

Any server can deny access, regardless of DNT.  Any server can ignore
the W3C recommendation, regardless of what this WG says.  Any server
can make a truthful statement about what they do or do not implement,
regardless of what this WG says.  What a server can't do right now is
make a machine-readable statement that "this particular UA is not
supported for DNT because its implementation is wrong, so if you'd
like to turn off tracking you will have to go to this nice little
form and tell us directly."  I want exactly one new status character
in the tracking status value to make that statement in a way that any
UA can understand.  I don't need it.  I want it for transparency.

....Roy