Re: History of device independence, User-Agent header?

Hi Dan,

I'm struggling to find again something I had written about the history of User-Agent, but in the meantime.


In "Support for User-Agent?" [1], there is a reference to
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/HTRQ_Headers.html#user-agent

In a message from 23 May 1993, [3] Tony Sanders is advocating for the support

     What are you browser writers thinking about supporting wrt HTTP/1.0 request
    headers (e.g., see the kerberos proposal below)? We need to think about
    how to implement the ChargeTo: and Authorization: headers in a generic
    way so the browser can easily support different styles. I would
    like to see From:, User-Agent:, and Referer: being used (currently
    I've only seen "Accept: text/plain" and "Authorization: user xxx").

In the notes from WWWW, July 28-30, 1993 [2]

    Browsers/servers should support at least the 
    following HTTP/1.0 object headers:

        Accept:
        Accept-Encoding:     ** See MIME Proposal_
        User-Agent:
        Allowed: [SPACEJUMP, GET, PUT, TEXTSEARCH, ...]
        Public: [SPACEJUMP, GET, PUT, TEXTSEARCH, ...]
        WWW-Link: REL="..." HREF="..."
        Content-Type:

As in the code of libwww, it was already there in  [5] when 'HTTPReq module' was added.
Fri May 5 14:45:57 1995 UTC (19 years, 2 months ago) by frystyk

    if (request->HeaderMask & HT_USER_AGENT) {
        sprintf(linebuf, "User-Agent: %s/%s libwww/%s%c%c",
            HTAppName ? HTAppName : "unknown",
            HTAppVersion ? HTAppVersion : "0.0",
            HTLibraryVersion, CR, LF);
        HTChunkPuts(header, linebuf);
        }


For device/browser independence, it might be a bit harder, but you can see than Nathan Torkington is talking about it in August 1993 [4]

    There is no one convention which will be applicable to all these uses
    of <A HREF...>. However, given the constraints:
    -- browser-independence,
    -- obviousness
    and
    -- generality,

[1]: http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1994q2/0564.html
[2]: http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/0461.html
[3]: http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q2/0368.html
[4]: http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/0365.html
[5]: http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/libwww/Library/src/HTTPReq.c?rev=2.1;content-type=text%2Fplain


-- 
Karl Dubost 🐄
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/

Received on Wednesday, 30 July 2014 10:26:43 UTC