- From: Felipe Gasper <fgasper@freeshell.org>
- Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 10:05:37 -0600
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
Quoth Chris Moschini on 3/30/2004 9:47 AM... > In fact, this ironic statement from Felipe Gasper sums it nicely: > >>I still just think it's a bad idea to start coding for particular UAs. >>... >>I use server-side scripting to identify UAs and then modify the CSS using PHP - >>not the prettiest solution, but it works. > > > Certainly. So you think it's best not to write CSS for specific UAs, but you use > an elaborate server-side sniffer to write CSS for specific UAs. In fact, you're > one of many who use this tactic, which is proof it both works and is effective. > > > So UA strings, while not wonderful, *are* usable. Usable, yes, but not good to be part of a standard. I didn't explicate my thoughts quite so clearly on this matter; it's a bad idea to *encourage* coding for particular UAs by integrating this technique into the standard. It has been, and should remain, regarded as a kludge. UA strings are useful, but it only really makes sense to have them come *from* the client, not from the client to the client. Right now, server-side is the only way of explicitly detecting browser and version. And I think it works sufficiently; is there a great benefit to detecting the user agent in CSS over server-side, other than the event that a CGI environment isn't available? Please let's not introduce another way of doing something that's hackish to begin with, writing it into an actual spec. I really think DOM should be the model here. Granted, CSS has many more subtleties than DOM as far as features being correctly implemented, but regardless, these technologies are meant to work in tandem with each other. They ought to take a similar approach to feature detection; namely, detect if it's supported and assume the good faith of the user agent. -Felipe Gasper
Received on Tuesday, 30 March 2004 11:05:48 UTC