The Rubber meets the Road - DNT compliance code

All,

There's a lot of questions around a non-compliant UA sending a DNT header.
There's still no definition on the forum or the spec on what constitutes a
non compliant UA, or even who is going to maintain a "blacklist" of those
non-compliant UA's. Finally there's no description of a message that should
be sent back to the consumer indicating that he's using a non-compliant UA.

So I'm posting a link today of what something might look like running on a
server. The reason this is in PHP is because there are lot of servers (in
the 10's of millions) that cannot suddenly start adding server side modules
that do the detection. So it will all have to be done via a script.

Think about this for a moment. In the real world server side admins are
going to have to add code to EVERY CGI script to do this. The performance
hit is going to be HUGE.

Here's the link: http://www.5o9mm.com/mod_dnt_test_1.php

We've blacklisted the following browsers:

HTTP_DNT_BLACKLISTED_USER_AGENT_1 = Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0;
Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)
HTTP_DNT_BLACKLISTED_USER_AGENT_2 = Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0;
Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)
HTTP_DNT_BLACKLISTED_USER_AGENT_3 = Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0;
Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)
HTTP_DNT_BLACKLISTED_USER_AGENT_4 = Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0;
Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)
HTTP_DNT_BLACKLISTED_USER_AGENT_5 = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:8.0.1)
Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1

So every time someone hits the Web site we have to run a check. The request
time for this check on our server is:

REQUEST_TIME = 1339597469

For that single page. Now multiply that by every page on your Web site that
is scripted. Ouch.

Now here's where it gets really interesting. Let's say that I'm on the
blacklist. What does the server do? By rights it should abort the entire
request and send a 400 invalid request response back to the user.

So what the heck does the user do now?

If this spec is going to be Trusted and used it has to work in the real
world which is NOT 100% technical. They turn it on (or have it turned on for
them) and they expect magic. They don't expect to be told that there browser
is non-compliant and they can either go get another one or get tracked.




Peter
___________________________________
Peter J. Cranstone
720.663.1752