Re: HTTP USER-AGENT header question

Hi Louis,

I think you should look at the CC/PP work being done at W3C. This came from
the world of mobile user agents, and is designed to allow for content to be
served to a wide variety of systems, according to their needs.

http://www.w3.org/Mobile/CCPP

cheers

Charles McCN

On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Louis Atkinson wrote:

  Hi,

  apologies if this is not apropos, but searching the list archives gave me a
  lot of hits, and the ones I browsed did not answer my question.

  Question:
  Has there been any discussion on creating a standard for how accessible user
  agents will identify themselves to the server?

  I have been trying to compile a list of the USER-AGENT HTTP headers used by
  accessible browsers. It struck me that if they all contained a string in
  common (similar to the way that many browsers use "Mozilla") it would make
  it easier to send them to a version of the site that has no graphics or
  specialized scripting. Something like having the string "WAI", rather than
  "Mozilla", and then the various product tokens, is what I am thinking.

  I am holding text content in a database and wrapping the interface around it
  to suit the capabilities of the user agents which access it, so can and do
  do this.

  My other main problem is that many people seem to be using screen reader
  plug-ins for IE and Netscape which do not allow for easy access to the
  relevant user agent string, but I am still convinced that there is a need
  for there to be some intelligence on the server side for these things.

  The page I have made to gather and list USER-AGENT strings is located here:
  http://www.highermind.org/design/user_agent/
  so if you know anyone who wants to add to it, it has a script that will get
  the string and add it to the database.

  Thank you very much.

  Best regards,
  Louis Atkinson
  Higher Mind Productions
  http://www.highermind.com/


-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1 617 258 5999
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Wednesday, 18 July 2001 01:29:55 UTC