On Tuesday 07 Feb 2006 23:01, Kent Sibilev wrote:> request.user_agent
Though please use that with extreme care and discretion, Thiago - browser
sniffing based on user-agent string is generally a very bad idea. I''m
not
saying you''re *definitely* doing it the wrong way (since I
don''t know what
you''re trying to do), but chances are there''s a better way you
can solve
almost any scenario where user-agent detection used to be the accepted
solution a few years back.
Server-side user-agent sniffing in particular... if you''re using that
to serve
up different versions of pages to different browsers, please seriously
reconsider! The only thing I would use server side UA detection for these
days is something like error log generation for the site owner.
Public-facing server-side UA detection is a big no-no, as far as I''m
concerned - it doesn''t work, unnecessarily hurts users, isn''t
future proof,
and basically isn''t even particularly necessary in the first place.
If you code to web standards, there are a lot of easy methods you can use to
make your site gracefully degrade for non-standards compliant (eg. older...
or Microsoft written, hehehe!) browsers. I don''t want to go into too
much
detail here, because I hope you already know most of these techniques. If
not, a good place to start is...
http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/
... which is one of the best web development books I ever bought.
All I wanted to say is that whenever anyone mentions browser detection,
especially server side, my alarm bells go off!! So I hope you are using it
for the right reasons, and if so, please accept my apologies for the
unwarranted concern!
Cheers,
~Dave
--
Dave Silvester
Rent-A-Monkey Website Development
http://www.rentamonkey.com/
PGP Key: http://www.rentamonkey.com/pgpkey.asc