Richard Cornford wrote:
cwdjrxyz wrote: Richard Cornford wrote: At which point the people writing the browsers you have never
heard off, and would so assume are incapable of anything,
start spoofing browser IDs. We just end up back where we are
now, with lots of people wasting their time thinking about
browser IDs in the same way people have been wasting their
time assuming that user agent strings could be a source of
information.
Of course you are right. So the international agency that
assigns browser IDs would have to have the ability to enforce
the standards and heavily fine or otherwise penalize browser
writers who violate them.
That is fine so long as it cuts both ways and any web author who is
caught excluding a browser because it identifies itself is subject to
equivalent fines and penalties. Anything short of that and you are
inviting a browser monopoly that would not be in the public interest.
<snip> .... I am only talking about enforcement of technical
standards.
<snip>
Aren't you the 'cwdjrxyz' who blew his credibility in alt.html by
championing a content negotiation script that disregarded the mechanism
laid out in the HTTP 1.1 specification and actually failed so badly that
it would send XHTML to browsers that explicitly declared their rejection
of it:-
<news:11******* **************@ f14g2000cwb.goo glegroups.com>
I don't think I will have much regard for any assertions you may make in
favour of technical standards until after I have seen some evidence that
you follow them yourself.
I do not see what bringing up an unrelated reference to another group
has to do with this. You quote only one post in a very long thread. In
summary I use a php include to force a browser to accept true xhtml 1.1
if it reports it will accept it at all in the header exchange. It is up
to the browser maker to decide if they want to allow true xhtml using
the mime type for xhtml+xml or not. If they do not allow it then my php
include reverts to html 4.01 strict. If I did not do that, my pages
would not work on IE6! Thus I do not send xhtml to browsers that do not
indicate that they will accept it! In some cases the browser says it
will accept either the mime type for true xhtml or the mime type for
html. In some of these cases it says it prefers html. In that case I
have found that the common browsers that will accept both html and true
xhtml, but "prefer" html, work just fine if you force the xhtml path in
the header exchange. My guess is that some browser makers specify that
they prefer html just to be on the safe side. One should not confuse a
"preference " for the browser with the code that can be used to indicate
that preference in the header exchange, if a browser writer so wishes.
In addition a few lesser used browsers do not indicate what they will
accept in the header exchange, although they sometimes really will
accept true xhtml just as well as well as html. Apple's Safari comes to
mind here. In that case, I err on the safe side and use html 4.01
strict, because browser detection of some of these browsers is not safe
because they can spoof another browser.
I now have dozens of pages served as described above, and they all
validate perfectly as xhtml 1.1 or html 4.01 strict at the W3C
depending on what path is selected by the header exchange. Furthermore,
the pages work properly for the xhtml 1.1 or html 4.01 strict path
selected by the header exchange I use. You can see several such pages
by going to
http://www.cwdjr.info/media/playersRoot.php .
