Re: Lots of noise about user agent strings

On Jun 1, 10:19 pm, "Richard Cornford" <Rich...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
VK wrote:
On Jun 1, 12:20 pm, Jorge wrote:
On May 29, 4:22 am, Peter Michaux wrote:

If you were a system administrator and you wanted to send
gzipped JavaScript files to save bandwidth, how would you
determine which browsers could accept gzipped files and
which could not?

Looking at the Accept-Encoding header.

In the context of the discussion I dare to question what
principal difference one sees between altering over say
(Gecko) about:config User-Agent string and altering
network.http.accept-encoding string? If one doesn't have
a trust to one chunk of info send by agent, why so
much trust to another chunk sent in the same request? ;-)

Who is proposing not trussing the User Agent header? The HTTP
specification defines it as an arbitrary sequence of characters that
does not even need to be consistent over time, and so as being something
that should not be treated as a source of information.

Are you positive about it?

Hypertext Transfer Protocol - HTTP/1.1

....
14.43 User-Agent
The User-Agent request-header field contains information about the
user agent originating the request. This is for statistical purposes,
the tracing of protocol violations, and automated recognition of user
agents for the sake of tailoring responses to avoid particular user
agent limitations. User agents SHOULD include this field with
requests. The field can contain multiple product tokens (section 3.8)
and comments identifying the agent and any subproducts which form a
significant part of the user agent. By convention, the product tokens
are listed in order of their significance for identifying the
application.
....

.

Relevant Pages

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