Browser Check

[Dennis M. Marks]

Why can't all browser companies agree on a "single function" to return
the browser, version, and platform? It that too much to ask.

--
Dennis M. Marks

http://www.dcs-chico.com/~denmarks/

Replace domain.invalid with dcsi.net


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[Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn]

Re: Browser Check

Dennis M. Marks wrote:
[color=blue]
> Why can't all browser companies agree on a "single function" to return
> the browser, version, and platform? It that too much to ask.[/color]

And what the heck should that achieve? User agents *are* different,
so are their DOMs to a certain extent, and it is good as it is.
Competition is good for business, no matter if you make bucks from it.

You clearly do not want to check for a bunch of combinations for user
agent, UA version, operating system, OS version, platform, platform
version aso. before you can do anything productive with the DOM nor
are you required to in most cases. Just check if the DOM provides the
functionality you need and you are done. You are not required to
support NS4's DOM nor IE4's DOM. You can create documents and
applications that work only client-side if standards-compliant W3C-DOM
is supported. The rest can use server-side capabilities, be sure to
provide them.


PointedEars
--
Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on
a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web,
when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another
computer, another word processor, or another network. -- Tim Berners-Lee

[Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn]

Re: Browser Check

Dennis M. Marks wrote:
[color=blue]
> Why can't all browser companies agree on a "single function" to return
> the browser, version, and platform? It that too much to ask.[/color]

What part of navigator.userA gent do you dislike? You have anything
you need in it. The problem is that the UA hen-egg-problem makes it
unreliable.


PointedEars

[Richard Cornford]

Re: Browser Check

Dennis M. Marks <25022004163438 4835%denmarks@d omain.invalid> wrote:[color=blue]
> Why can't all browser companies agree on a "single function"
> to return the browser, version, and platform?[/color]

Browser manufactures are not motivated to honestly report the type and
version of their browsers because web authors commonly use that
information to exclude (particularly unknown) browsers from web sites
(or to server them CSS striped, cut down versions of pages). And if the
browser manufacturer has gone to the effort of implementing a functional
W3C DOM, ECMAScript and CSS 2 support in addition to HTML rendering they
do not want their browser being made to look like an less than capable
just because some web author doesn't recognise it by name. Solution:
claim to be IE, in the user agent string, the navigator.userA gnet
property and implement a document.all collection (and possibly a dummy
ActiveXObject constructor along with anything else that is used to
exclude non-IE browsers from sites).
[color=blue]
> It that too much to ask.[/color]

Would it be too much to ask that *all* web authors then fully supported
the features of every browser that honestly reported its type and
version, in return? We know that isn't going to happen so the browser
manufacturers are going to keep spoofing each other and rendering any
attempt to identify a browser invalid. So it is a good thing that an
alternative approach exists where it is unnecessary for a script author
to care about the type or version of a browser; feature detecting. Once
you don't need to know the type or version it stops mattering that it is
impossible to tell.

Richard.