[9692] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Microsoft IE -- it just gets better and better (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (M. Hedlund)
Sat Jan 27 14:04:02 1996
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 1996 10:43:10 -0700
To: BearHeart / Bill Weinman <bearheart@bearnet.com>,
Brian Behlendorf <brian@organic.com>, www-talk@w3.org
From: hedlund@best.com (M. Hedlund)
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
At 12:37 AM 1/27/96, BearHeart / Bill Weinman wrote:
>
>At 10:11 pm 1/26/96 -0800, Brian Behlendorf spake:
>>Maybe we should thank Microsoft for pointing out how silly and utterly
>>useless User-Agent is for content negotiation. [...]
>
> User-Agent may not be the most technologically whiz-bang thing
>you can think of for content-negotiation, but it works.
>
> Your justifying Microsoft's mockery of it is a slap-in-the-face to
>all the people who are working their collective ass off in a monumental,
>cooperative, and VOLUNTEER effort to create a set of standards that
>will allow the Net to grow and thrive.
>[...]
> I thank them for nothing,
> and I thank you for nothing.
Brian is at a WWW standards meeting in Boston right now (oh, the irony),
and therefore can't respond. Allow me.
User-agent negotiation _does not_ work. Some feature X is implemented in
User-Agent Y. The erroneous assumption made by user-agent negotiation is
that all browsers not-Y do not have feature X. Microsoft, implementing
feature X in browser not-Y, was unable to make use of that feature, and
therefore posed as browser Y.
If user-agent negotiation did work, as soon as MSIE hit the streets, all
negotiating sites would immediately add MSIE to the list of X-capable
browsers used in their negotiation algorithm. Of course, that doesn't
happen. A real negotiation solution would allow a browser to advertise its
capabilities automatically and concisely, saying "I can do feature X."[1]
Microsoft's solution:
1) works for them; and
2) demonstrates the frustration non-Netscape developers feel with
this situation. (Maybe Netscape developers, too, but it seems less of a
problem for them.)
What I found silly about MSIE 2.0b for Mac was that, by default, it
"claims" to implement features that it doesn't [2]. What I find irritating
is that a standards body exists to try to solve this problem [3], and
Microsoft hasn't decided that this is enough of a problem to send a
representative. (If anyone associated with MSIE is interested in joining,
send me mail and I'll reply with group info.)
These are all just data points intended to drive the development of a real
negotiation solution.
Marc Hedlund <hedlund@best.com>, <marc@organic.com>
[1] Another solution would be to devise a conditional HTML system that
allowed the browser to make rendering choices based on feature-identifiers.
Netscape's <frameset>/<noframes> tags are an instance of this, as is the
"fallback text" in the <applet> tag. For that matter, the "alt" parameter
to the <img> tag is also a form of conditional HTML. The problem is that
there is a different solution for each of the three tags I just mentioned
-- there's no generalized system. Brian and I have been working on a
document proposing such a system.
[2] I received mail after my last message saying the MSIE 2.0B for Mac does
indeed render server-pushes. If this is the case, my apologies for the
error. I tested MSIE on <URL:http://www.levi.com/menu.nhtml> and got a
bunch of broken-image icons.
[3] Bill, your slam on Brian for his "slap-in-the-face" to those "working
their collective ass off in a monumental, cooperative, and VOLUNTEER effort
to create a set of standards" is ill-informed (not to mention overwrought).
Brian is one of the ten or so members of the content negotiation subgroup.
He is one of the people you claim he is insulting.
