> mycb> Sure, but why would a user want to fake their browser signature? > > They might do it without even knowing. Opera will identify itself as > IE6 for example if you select that in the Preferences. Other > browsers/packages can do it as standard. Although I can't give a > specific example, I bet there are some firewalls out there that filter > this information out too.
When I ran Opera, I all but HAD to set it as "IE5" (Opera 6.05 I think was the last version I ran) because if I didn't, many websites would, for lack of a better term, discriminate against the non IE header info and pass you to a page that was very stripped of features and layout and sometimes was barely thrown together, much less 'developed'. And if you went to a site like Hotmail.com, you lost a LOT of functionality. Assuming that Microsoft didn't do this out of spite, the basic assumption was "Oh, you're not running Internet Explorer.. You must not be capable of doing CSS or whatever". Opera functioned just fine on these sites if you told it to impersonate IE. > >> I saw a response letting you know how to do this, but I would > >> recommend not sending people to different pages based on which > >> browser/OS they're using. > > mycb> Why not? Isn't that what most of the big web sites do? > > Actually yes, lots of them do. So I agree with you here :) Many big sites do this, but as illustrated in the example I gave above, it's not always justified or welcome. I personally hate designing too many different pages to suit all the needs of the browsers, so I try to work with what most of the browsers will handle right off. True, that's not going to take into account Lynx users or whatever, but if I don't OVER design what I'm working on, then it still shouldn't turn out too bad. There are always exceptions though. Thankfully, designing primarily for an internal corporate environment right now, I have some insight into what people are using and some control over what they NEED to use in order to make use of the functions that I implement. > mycb> What about obsolete browsers that don't handle CSS too > well (or not at all)? We > > I think his point was that there are other ways to handle browser > display issues besides 2 versions of a site and a user_agent test. True. You know.. Browsers really need to be able to talk more to scripts to let them know what their capabilities are. You can do this to some degree, but I think we should be able to ask the browser itself if it knows tag <xxxxx> and it can respond 'yea' or 'nay'. Then, if there's a known issue with the implementation of that tag in that browser (glitches, bugs and such) then we can use the browser identification to decide if it's worth using that tag or not. Handle it all programatically. No sense having 95% functional HTML and having 5% blow up when we can toggle the use of that 5% via PHP depending on certain conditions. Ok, I'm rambling.. Excuse me. I'm making like 3 or 4 different points at once. -TG -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
