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And one of the stupidest things about browsers lying about their UserAgent
field
is that some sites automatically send out various pages based on what
browsers
can display. And you'll find that while browser's claiming another
browser's UserAgent
may support the same HTML tags and so forth, they rarely lay out the page in
the
same manner. In some cases the page gets an entirely different look. One
of the
points of a UserAgent field is the ability to tailor a page to the user's
capabilities and
and another point is the ability to maintain a consistent look to all users
by
designing specificially for various browsers.
-- David Levine, Application Engineer InterWorld Technology Ventures, Inc. david@interworld.com http://www.interworld.com/staff/david/
>---------- >From: Benjamin Franz[SMTP:snowhare@netimages.com] >Sent: Friday, May 03, 1996 8:21 AM >To: robots@webcrawler.com >Subject: Re: Political economy of distributed search (was topical >search...) > >On Fri, 3 May 1996, Jeremy.Ellman wrote: > >> >> > The simple fact is that integration is >> It's impossible to block, because there's >> > no way for a service to determine a normal user query from a >> > WebCompass query (unless the WebCompass folks choose to do so, eh >> > Brian?) >> > >> >> Disagree. You can refuse to reply to any GET/POST etc that does not >contain a USER-AGENT >> you like. Eg Reply straight in MOZILLA etc but ask interactive questions >of other >> browsers. This would block these robots (unless they were going to spoof >-- but what >> commercial product could do this on copyright grounds?) > >Based on the number of agents *already* showing in my logs as >'Mozilla....(xzcxcxv;compatible;sdfsdf) - a lot of products. It has caused >me a fair amount of trouble having to progesssively modify my >browsercounter software to detect the spoofers. > >Microsoft started this rather disturbing trend of user agents lying about >who they are - but they were most certainly not the last. Also - the >potential infringment is not copyright but trademark. > >-- >Benjamin Franz > >
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