- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2012 12:24:51 -0400
- To: public-webapps@w3.org
On 10/11/12 9:09 AM, Julian Aubourg wrote: > Did you ask backend devs why they white-listed browsers? Yes. Typically they don't have a good answer past "we felt like it", in my experience. Particularly for the ones that will send you different content based on somewhat random parts of your UA string (like whether you're using an Irish Gaelic localized browser or not). > Did you try and educate them? Yes. With little success. > Did you ever encounter any sensible use-case for this? For serving different content based on UA string? Sure, though there are pretty few such uses cases. The question is whether it should be possible to spoof the UA to get the other set of content. For example, if I _am_ using an Irish Gaelic localized Firefox, should I still be able to get the content the site would send to every single other Firefox localization? Seems like that might be desirable, especially because the site wasn't actually _trying_ to lock out Gaelic speakers; it just happens to not be very good at parsing UA strings. > You have to be very careful with breaking backward compatibility. It's not clear to me how the ability to set the UA string breaks backwards compatibility, offhand. -Boris
Received on Thursday, 11 October 2012 16:25:24 UTC