User Agents and Menus

[Raventhorn]

I am having problems that I also saw people having in the ASP.NET forums with
menus and people coming to a site with weird user agent values. Is there a
way to access the user agent before the user hits the site so we can
determine which ones are screwing up our site? Also, is there a list of user
agents available for different browsers?

[darrel]

> I am having problems that I also saw people having in the ASP.NET forums
with

menus and people coming to a site with weird user agent values. Is there a
way to access the user agent before the user hits the site so we can
determine which ones are screwing up our site? Also, is there a list of user agents available for different browsers?

It's not the user agent that's screwing up your site, it's your site's HTML.
;o)

You can, of course, get the user agent string, but these aren't always
accurate and browser detection is rarely the best (ie, most efficient) way
towards solving your issues. Can you explain a bit more what you mean by
'menus' and what, exactly, is breaking?

-Darrel

[Raventhorn]

I have a site that is released using ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2 (www.bridgestar.org).
I have users that are complaining that they cannot access the site and get an
error in MS's code (Menu.OnPreRender). I have isolated the problem down to a
problem with setting the colors and fonts of the menu's various display
properties. I also have narrowed it down pretty much to people who must be
coming in with odd User Agent settings as I have tried using a User Agent
switcher extention tool in FireFox to try and repro the bug. So...I am hoping
to trap the error for now and find out what User Agent strings are being
passed when the error occurs so I can send it to MS and they can fix this bad
boy.

"darrel" wrote:

I am having problems that I also saw people having in the ASP.NET forums

with

menus and people coming to a site with weird user agent values. Is there a
way to access the user agent before the user hits the site so we can
determine which ones are screwing up our site? Also, is there a list of

user

agents available for different browsers?

It's not the user agent that's screwing up your site, it's your site's HTML.
;o)

You can, of course, get the user agent string, but these aren't always
accurate and browser detection is rarely the best (ie, most efficient) way
towards solving your issues. Can you explain a bit more what you mean by
'menus' and what, exactly, is breaking?

-Darrel

[darrel]

> I have a site that is released using ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2
(www.bridgestar.org).

I have users that are complaining that they cannot access the site and get an error in MS's code (Menu.OnPreRender).

I assume that by 'menu' you mean some sort of .net control that creates a
menu on the site. I wouldn't be surprised one bit that this control is
making invalid markup (not unlike a lot of default controls in .net).

The problem is most likely the HTML and/or the Javascript that .net is
spitting out and it's not browser agnostic.

There probably isn't a 'fix' other than to not use the default control as-is
in .net (which is usually a good idea anyways).

If my 'menu' you mean a fly-out javascript menu, there are only two products
I can recomment that fulfil usability and accessibility guidelines:

http://www.projectseven.com
http://www.udm4.com

Every other menu system/control I've looked at has some flaws in some way or
another.

-Darrel