Hi,
Whilst I don't necessarily condone having alternate pages for specific
browsers, there are workarounds to your points below. I seem to recall
chatting with Nick from Cambridge about them during the drinks reception
in Glasgow ;-)
On Sat, 13 Jul 2002, Jon Warbrick wrote:
> 1) Such pages can't be cached in shared caches.
Solution: have www.cam.ac.uk/index_netscape.html and index_ie.html. Ugly,
but cacheable.
> 2) You have to keep your browser match lists up to date, and decide what
> you do about unrecognised browsers.
Solution: get someone else to do the hard work for you. One example of
this can be found in Cocoon[1], which uses HP's DELI library for browser
detection[2].
Whilst browser detection to pander to broken Netscape 4 or to provide
wizzy effects for IE6 is generally considered bad, user agent detection
_WILL_ become more and more important as part of initiatives such as the
semantic web.[3] This is not something that will go away.
[1] http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/
[2] http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/developing/deli.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html
Andrew.
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