- From: Koen Holtman <koen@win.tue.nl>
- Date: Fri, 2 Feb 1996 11:15:10 +0100 (MET)
- To: connolly@beach.w3.org (Daniel W. Connolly)
- Cc: bearheart@bearnet.com, brian@organic.com, www-talk@w3.org
Daniel W. Connolly: > >The HTTP specification effort was an open, collaborative effort. >The resulting spec doesn't specify that User-Agent: can be used >reliably for anything. I disagree. The spec states that the information in the User-Agent field is "for statistical purposes, the tracing of protocol violations, and automated recognition of user agents for the sake of tailoring responses to avoid particular user agent limitations." By generating a User-Agent field that does not give any clue that the user agent in question is in fact _not_ some Netscape version, Microsoft IE defeats these stated purposes of the User-Agent field, and violates the (draft) protocol. I agree with you that one cannot expect to reliably use the user-agent field to detect whether the user agent can do tables. However, I do expect to be able to use the user-agent field to reliably negotiate around known bugs in user agents, the draft spec says that I can. >Dan Koen.
Received on Friday, 2 February 1996 05:16:21 UTC