The IU OnCourse site (http://oncourse.iu.edu/) does not "support" the Camino browser, even though it supports Netscape. The maintainers apparently do not understand that the key string they should be looking for in the USER_AGENT string is 'Gecko', and not 'Netscape'. I have written the "Oncourse team" about this (among other things, the appropriate part of copied below), but to no avail (they are a centralized, bureaucratic nightmare). The 'suggestion box' email is
https://falcon.iu.edu/iu/uits/oncourse-admins/ocsuggest.html
The Vice President for Information Technology at IU (one of them - we have *90* - at least) is Rick Jackson, and his email is mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] .
Can I ask appeal to the Camino community to write (politely, please) to the above "suggestion box" or email, with reasonable suggestions, or further evidence (what more do you need?) that Gecko should be the string of importance, and not Netscape (although, as my last post points out, there are differences between the rendering - but I have *never* encountered any problems with OnCourse - it uses a lot of JS, frames, and tables, but nothing more)
Jim Witte
-- message sent to "suggestion box" --
For the past year or so, I have been using the Camino MacOSX browser (an offshoot of the Mozilla project using the Gecko engine), and more recently Apple's Safari browser (using the KHTML engine). Both browsers are JS and Java standards compliant, and I have used both without complaint from Oncourse.
Camino's USER_AGENT environment variable is (for my machine):
HTTP USER_AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6a) Gecko/20031009 Camino/0.7+
and Safari's string is:
HTTP USER_AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/103u (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/100.1
It would be nice if there were a standardized way for students (and others) who know about such things (CS students for instance) to have a process to "approve" such as-of-now "unapproved" browsers. At the very least (although tis would require more work than just adding another allowed string), would be to have a cookie on the user's machine alerting OnCourse that this browser is known to work with the system.
The insistence of web-sites that certain browsers may not work (even though the USER_AGENT variable, in looking at a particular *browser* and not a *feature set* is a very crude indicator of how a particular site will perform), coupled with the fact that it is usually practically impossible for semi-knowledgable web-users (i.e. people who know a bit about Perl on the side) to get the lists of "approved browsers" changed, may be one of the many reasons why the moderate number of "alternative" browsers (other than Netscape or Explorer) get used. And anyway, Netscape and Camino are both based on the Mozilla codebase now - so why is Netscape supposed better working? The answer of course, is that Oncourse is looking for "Netscape" in the USER_AGENT string, not "Mozilla" or "Gecko" which would really matter.
[...]
Jim Witte [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ph: (812) 334-7949 (preferred contact: email)
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