On Wed, 07 Mar 2007 17:46:43 -0000, Elliotte Harold
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
How so?
Well, your article advocates sniffing specific user agents where the
one written by Mark Pilgrim uses the Accept: header which was actually
designed for this... Google, for one, is known for not supporting XHTML
really well.
I'm not doing content negotiation here.
From HTTP point of view you are.
There's one representation available. It is XHTML. We can send that to
most browsers and they'll deal reasonably. Two I know of have problems
(IE and Lynx) so we lie to them and tell them it's text/html.
Use of Accept does not require you to return completly different
representations, you can use it just like you used User-Agent.
However Accept contains exactly the information you're trying to (and
failing to) derive from User-Agent header.
I am curious what problems Google has with XHTML. Then they deal.
Last time I checked they were marking XHTML documents as "Unknown format".
Since Google certainly has engineers aware and capable of fixing this
problem, Google must be ignoring XHTML deliberately. I suspect they
support only what works for their customers and XHTML in XML mode doesn't
work for vast majority of them.
User-agent sniffing is a bad practice - it's inaccurate, hurts minority
browsers and is not forward-compatible. Please change your method to use
Accept header, so it won't be affecting any HTML-only user-agents (web is
more than a handful of desktop browsers). Accept method will even work
for MSIE and Lynx when/if they start supporting XHTML.
Even your regular expressions for User-Agent aren't doing exactly what you
intended, because mod_rewrite does not anchor patterns.
--
regards, Kornel Lesiński
