Re: Standards Compliant = No support for NN4?

>   Ah, but there is the clincher: if I am using Lynx in order to linearize
>   a document in order to output it through Speech or Braille, then I am
>   left with a suggestion - on each page?? - that in order to get the glory
>   out of the site I should 'upgrade' to a browser using CSS.

Although not so common recently, this sort of thing tends to make Lynx
users complain on the Lynx mailing list that they are being discriminated
against.  They often think it is the result of parsing the user agent
string (or rather the comments, as all major browsers seem to be one
of a very small number of versions of Mozilla), so try different ways
of faking the user agent string.

The fact that minor browser users tend to fake user agent to get round
real or imagined discrimination (which is sometimes simply using very
out of date information about browser capabilities), means that user
agent is quite unreliable at identifying such browsers.  (A quite common
question on the list is what is the best user agent string to use to
trick sites into thinking that Lynx is a supported browser.)

Actually IE was once a minor browser, which is why the big two now provide
the real information in the comment.  IE had to fake a Netscape user
agent string in order to get round "this site is for Netscape only" type
discrimination.

Received on Wednesday, 19 June 2002 17:26:18 UTC