[9691] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Microsoft IE -- it just gets better and better
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (BearHeart / Bill Weinman)
Sat Jan 27 13:47:47 1996
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 1996 12:23:52 -0600
To: mwm@contessa.phone.net (Mike Meyer), www-talk@w3.org
From: BearHeart / Bill Weinman <bearheart@bearnet.com>
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
At 12:41 am 1/27/96 PST, Mike Meyer spake:
>> User-Agent may not be the most technologically whiz-bang thing
>> you can think of for content-negotiation, but it works.
>If it works, then why did MS and others feel the need to use it (*)
>the way they did. The fact is, it DOESN'T work. The group doing the
It works for what it's good for: I can have two versions of
my Site: one for Netscape and one for Everyone Else. MS is trying
to force me to have three--and I don't want to.
When the content-negotiation features of HTTP/1.1 become
more than a set of words in a draft, I'll gladly use them. But
for the time being User-Agent and Accept are what we have and
they were working before MS threw a wrench in the works. That's
my only beef here.
>This IS content negotiation. Servers provide the pages with the best
>markup to Mozilla. If you want that content, you can either say you
>are Mozilla,
>(*) They used it - they did the thing that gets the best results for
>THEIR users.
<sigh> But it doesn't get the results for their users. What
it gets them is more confusion. When they were identifying themselves
as "Mozilla/1.22 (compatible)", I believed that was their purpose.
But "Mozilla/2.0b3", without "MSIE" in any part of the string is an
outright lie designed to break the system. They don't support ANY of
the Moz 2.0 features--so what are they trying to do besides break
the system?
Their making a configurable option for the user to put in whatever
string they want is a mockery of the system and of all the efforts
of this volunteer group.
Add to that their refusal to participate in the content-negotiation negotiations and their intention becomes clear: To force their way
into the market and into the position of unilatterally setting the
standards.
That's not negotiation, that's terrorism.
MS is trying to force me to provide a separate set of content to
their browser. Ant they're holding all my Netscape users hostage
for it.
>or convince thousands of webmasters to fix their
>software.
The implication that their software is broken is short-sighted.
If the facility was there to handle smaller granularity of variation
in content, and the facility was there to specify it (which is
what the content-negotiation folks are working on), then I would
gladly support it.
But all I've got today is User-Agent and Accept. And "Accept" tells
me nothing about what the client does with Tables, or Multi-Block
GIFs, or Server-Push (multipart/x-mixed-replace), etc., etc., etc.
>I've been seeing a lot of snake oil on the web lately, and I've always
>considered content negotiation based on user agent as such. Convince
>me I'm wrong, and that you're successfully negotiating content based
>on user-agent. Tell me how you treat emacs-w3? IBrowse? Charlotte?
You're implying that for it to be successful it must handle
all variations as individual cases. That's not practicable. In
theory, Yes it can be done; in practice, It's more work than value.
I think you know that, and that's why you're supporting the efforts
of content-negotiation in HTTP/1.1--and I agree with you. But it's
no excuse for breaking what's working today.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| BearHeart / Bill Weinman | BearHeart@bearnet.com | http://www.bearnet.com/
| Author of The CGI Book -- http://www.bearnet.com/cgibook/
