- From: Jon Gunderson <jongund@staff.uiuc.edu>
- Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 16:13:32 -0600
- To: w3c-wai-ua@w3.org
At the meeting in LA last week a new accessibility problem was announced called browser sniffing. Browser sniffing is done by a Web server to determine what browser requested information and denying information if you are not an approved browser. This is a problem since many browsers used by persons with disabilities are not "approved" by these servers. The practice seems to orginate by organizations (like banks) concerned about security and limiting the site to browsers that support secure transations. The current method of sniffing does not really detect if a browser supports secure transactions, it mainly just wants to know if you are netscape navigator or microsoft explorer. So even if your browser can handle secure transactions, the serve will ignore the request. Main questions for the user agent group is: Is this an issue the user agent working group wants to deal with? If so what do we want to do? How many people in the current working group are familiar with this problem and the technical issues surrounding it? Jon Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign 1207 S. Oak Street Champaign, IL 61820 Voice: 217-244-5870 Fax: 217-333-0248 E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu WWW: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess
Received on Monday, 30 March 1998 17:12:15 UTC