Re: SV: distinguising user- from browser-generated requests

Well, the referer URI will not discriminate between the two cases that Nick
asked about.

Nick should look into the work of the Web Characterization Activity
<www.w3.org/WCA/> for other people working on questions such as this: what
one can learn from what one can log.

Al

At 06:42 PM 6/23/99 +0200, Christian Bøhn wrote:
>Check out the referer header, it should referer the page which contained
it, but of course this is not a safe method.
>
>HTH,
>Christian Bøhn
>
>
>
>>When an HTML page is rendered, the browser might spawn additional requests 
>>to the server (images, frames, style sheets, applets, ...).  Within HTTP, 
>>can the server reliably distinguish such "browser-generated" requests from 
>>actual user requests (ie, when a user clicks on a link)?
>>
>>To make this concrete, suppose an HTML page contains:
>>   <A href="q.jpg"><IMG src="q.jpg"></A>
>>Can the server distinguish between the browser's request for "q.jpg" to 
>>render the HTML, and
>>the user's request for "q.jgp" by clicking on the hyperlink?
>>
>>Assume that the HTML is not under my control -- ie, I can't simply replace 
>>the href above with "q.jpg?user".
>>
>>thanks for any suggestions!
>>
>>-- Nick
>>
>>- + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - +
>>+                     Nicholas Kushmerick                     -
>>-  Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin  +
>>+          nick@ucd.ie      www.cs.ucd.ie/staff/nick          -
>>- + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - +
>>
>>
> 

Received on Wednesday, 23 June 1999 13:14:22 UTC