- From: Chris Maden <crism@oreilly.com>
- Date: Sun, 9 Aug 1998 19:54:11 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-html@w3.org
[Mike Meyer] > You also missed *my* favorite reason for disliking UA negotiation - > it tends to leave the very capable but non-mainstream browsers with > the lowest-common-denominator pages. For instance, inline JPEG, PNG > and and PostScript were all done well before Navigator did > them. However, if you do a UA negotation without a fairly complete > database, those advanced browsers are liable to get the low-quality > version. You can also end up with page designers who don't understand a particular browser's capabilities, and screw up the document served out to it. Try movielink.com in Lynx some time: rosetta-stone-2> telnet www.movielink.com 80 Trying 205.228.252.3... Connected to www.movielink.com. Escape character is '^]'. GET / HTTP/1.0 User-Agent: Lynx/2.8 HTTP/1.0 302 Found Server: Netscape-Commerce/1.12 Date: Sunday, 09-Aug-98 23:53:04 GMT Location: http://web52.movielink.com/? Connection closed by foreign host. rosetta-stone-3> telnet web52.movielink.com 80 Trying 205.228.252.52... Connected to web52.movielink.com. Escape character is '^]'. GET / HTTP/1.0 User-Agent: Lynx/2.8 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sun, 09 Aug 1998 23:45:18 GMT Server: Apache/1.2.5 Connection: close Content-Type: text/plain Connection closed by foreign host. And it's actually looking *for* the string "Lynx", not just not finding another string; "Netscape/3.0 (compatible; Lynx 2.8)" will fail just as egregiously. Note that the Web server states "200 OK" - and then doesn't serve anything at all out. Sorry to ramble on; this is one of the most offensive sites on the 'net, to my mind. -Chris -- <!NOTATION SGML.Geek PUBLIC "-//Anonymous//NOTATION SGML Geek//EN"> <!ENTITY crism PUBLIC "-//O'Reilly//NONSGML Christopher R. Maden//EN" "<URL>http://www.oreilly.com/people/staff/crism/ <TEL>+1.617.499.7487 <USMAIL>90 Sherman Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA" NDATA SGML.Geek>
Received on Monday, 10 August 1998 01:09:54 UTC