- From: Kornel Lesinski <kornel@osiolki.net>
- Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2007 21:11:15 -0000
On Wed, 07 Mar 2007 17:46:43 -0000, Elliotte Harold <elharo at metalab.unc.edu> wrote: >>> How so? >> Well, your article advocates sniffing specific user agents where the >> one written by Mark Pilgrim uses the Accept: header which was actually >> designed for this... Google, for one, is known for not supporting XHTML >> really well. > > I'm not doing content negotiation here. From HTTP point of view you are. > There's one representation available. It is XHTML. We can send that to > most browsers and they'll deal reasonably. Two I know of have problems > (IE and Lynx) so we lie to them and tell them it's text/html. Use of Accept does not require you to return completly different representations, you can use it just like you used User-Agent. However Accept contains exactly the information you're trying to (and failing to) derive from User-Agent header. > I am curious what problems Google has with XHTML. Then they deal. Last time I checked they were marking XHTML documents as "Unknown format". Since Google certainly has engineers aware and capable of fixing this problem, Google must be ignoring XHTML deliberately. I suspect they support only what works for their customers and XHTML in XML mode doesn't work for vast majority of them. User-agent sniffing is a bad practice - it's inaccurate, hurts minority browsers and is not forward-compatible. Please change your method to use Accept header, so it won't be affecting any HTML-only user-agents (web is more than a handful of desktop browsers). Accept method will even work for MSIE and Lynx when/if they start supporting XHTML. Even your regular expressions for User-Agent aren't doing exactly what you intended, because mod_rewrite does not anchor patterns. -- regards, Kornel Lesi?ski
Received on Wednesday, 7 March 2007 13:11:15 UTC