[11331] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: distinguising user- from browser-generated requests
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Koen Holtman)
Wed Jun 23 13:28:56 1999
From: koen@win.tue.nl (Koen Holtman)
To: nick@ucd.ie (Nicholas Kushmerick)
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 19:28:22 +0200 (MET DST)
Cc: www-talk@w3.org
In-Reply-To: <01BEBD7E.0E7C2AE0.nick@ucd.ie> from "Nicholas Kushmerick" at Jun 23, 99 01:41:10 pm
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
Nicholas Kushmerick:
>
>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)?
No, there is no reliable way to do this in HTTP.
Examining the 'referer' HTTP request header field could offer an
unreliable way: you will have to experiment a bit. I'm not quite sure
what the different browsers send in the 'referer' of inlined content:
the URI of the enclosing page or the URI of the page referring to the
enclosing page.
Koen.
