Re: Should UA string spoofing be treated as a trademark violation?

Richard Cornford wrote:
1. As the issue applies to all Windows browsers that employ
the native Windows select GUI component to represent HTML
select elements
I'm not sure that is true.
As you wish.

Not as I wish, just reality ;)

I'm talking only about the cases which cannot be covered by the
more reliable alternative.
When considering alternatives I tend to consider how wrong an
alternative that has the potential to be wrong is capable of being.
Browser detection on the public Internet is capable of being utterly
wrong, even to the extent of being catastrophically wrong and making
the script itself the barrier to a site being useable to a visitor.

True. But it can also be used to fix small errors and quirks which will not
have a negative impact on any functionality for any mis-identified user, but
will make the style or functionality better for those who are correctly
identified.

BrowserHawk, as mentioned in a recent thread is an excellent example;

Something along the same lines that should be mentioned is ASP.NET from
Microsoft. I don't work with it, but my exposure to it leads me to believe
that it does extensive browser-capability "detection" based on the user
agent header and serves various levels of rich content as a result. I got
into an argument with a .NET developer when I said that this was surely a
flawed way to determine what content to serve. His response was along the
lines of "Microsoft is the software giant and surely employees more experts
in these fields than anyone you know. Don't you think they would know the
best way to do it? We've built .NET apps before and we've never had a single
complaint."

It's hard to argue against cases like this, where a huge software company
uses the "wrong approach" yet does it with overwhelming success for the vast
majority of users.

--
Matt Kruse
http://www.JavascriptToolbox.com
http://www.AjaxToolbox.com


.

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