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

s t e f notabene at members.evolt.org
Wed Jan 8 09:08:00 CST 2003


Peter-Paul Koch said:
>
> The reason for a server side browser detect is usually to decide which
> style sheet or js file to send to the browser. This is as bad as using a
> JavaScript browser detect to document.write the correct LINK or SCRIPT
> tag.
>
> The only valid reason for a server side browser detect is to actually
> detect which browsers come to your site and to store this information.

Right.

Not wanting to launch into a flame war (you should know me better than
that by now) so here's a live situation:

We needed quite a complex dhtml collapsible menu. I decided that we would
not implement it for older navigators (like NN4.x). Yet half our intranet
is equipped with NN4.5 (although the admins are doing their best to
upgrade all the amchines, but hey... several tens of thousands).

We opted for a plain-vanilla, all-unfolded menu for older and text
browsers, and dhtml-showoff menus for modern browsers (being on an
intranet lets you be a little less demanding on 100% compliance, I guess).

That was a valid reason to use server-side detection, wasn't it?

Actually we thought it would be more rational (especially less
time-consuming) to go down this road rather than putting up a
client-side-100%-compliance with such a split intranet (half-old,
half-DOM).

What do you think?

s t e f





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