[thelist] Safari details + UA string (was Apple releases new browser for OS

[Peter-Paul Koch]

>>>>And before anyone asks it uses the following UA string:
>>>>
>>>>"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/48 (like
>>>>Gecko) Safari/48"
>>>
>>>
>>>Ugh. Why the hell did they put Gecko in the UA string? So now instead of
>>>a reliable way to pick moz based browsers out further filtering is
>>>needed. Thanks Apple...
>>
>>
>>Usual reason: people use browser detects to spot standards compliant
>>browsers and Safari wishes to end up on the correct side of those detects.
>
>Yes, but I have no idea if it supports text/xml with xhtml + mathml and
>have no way of finding out. if it can't handle it, they're just hurting
>their users.
>
>>Don't use a browser detect. Ever. For whatever reason.
>
>I hate browser detects as much as anyone, but thanks to the incompitence of
>IE I have no choice. xhtml + mathml should be served as text/xml,  but IE
>tries to read some ridiculously huge dtd when it is, and what's worse, says
>the dtd has an error and craps out. Moz works perfectly.  How else am I
>meant to differentiate?

<voice tone="stern">

Personally I find all this stuff about text/xml+xhtml complete and total
nonsense (though I'd never heard of the mathml MIME type before and this may
be another case).

The MIME type of an HTML page is the good old time-honoured text/html which
is about the only thing on the entire WWW to have a guaranteed browser
compatibility of 100% and has served us faithfully over the past ten years.

There is absolutely no reason to change it, and I have the feeling W3C has
specified this complicated stuff just to specify some more complicated
stuff.

Anyone wanting to try text/xml+html is on his own, as far as I'm concerned,
and shouldn't complain when he runs into severe browser compatibility
problems that can be easily solved by using text/html.

It is certainly not a good reason to use a browser detect (besides which, a
browser detect isn't the solution to the problem either, as has been proven
by Safari).

</voice>

Sorry for the stern voice, but lately I'm getting slightly annoyed at people
who do complicated, unnecessary things and then complain that the things
they're doing are so complicated to implement.

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ppk, freelance web developer
Interaction, copywriting, JavaScript, integration
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/
Column "Keep it Simple": http://www.digital-web.com/columns/keepitsimple/
Nieuw: Jaaroverzicht 2002
http://www.naarvoren.nl/artikel/jaaroverzicht_2002.html
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