Steve,
> If this has been discussed to death elsewhere and represents
> some bizarrely-informed consensus, I'll try to spare this list
> my belated rantings, but this is a terrible, terrible idea.
> Relying on User-Agent represents the very antithesis of
> [[Postel's Law]], a rock-solid principle o which the Internet
> (used to be) based.
RFC2616:
14.43 User-Agent
The User-Agent request-header field contains information about the user agent
originating the request. This is for statistical purposes, the tracing of
protocol violations, and automated recognition of user agents for the sake of
tailoring responses to avoid particular user agent limitations. User agents
SHOULD include this field with requests. The field can contain multiple product
tokens (section 3.8) and comments identifying the agent and any subproducts
which form a significant part of the user agent. By convention, the product
tokens are listed in order of their significance for identifying the
application.
User-Agent = "User-Agent" ":" 1*( product | comment )
Example:
User-Agent: CERN-LineMode/2.15 libwww/2.17b3
RFC2119:
3. SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
I guess you just found one more implication to carefully weight before not
specifying U-A.
Domas
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