From: G. James Berigan (usefor@war-of-the-worlds.org)
Date: Wed Oct 27 1999 - 21:37:59 CDT
chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk (Charles Lindsey) wrote:
>In <199910181537.QAA15990@clw.cs.man.ac.uk>
>Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
>> User-Agent:
>> -----------
>>
>> It seems not realistic to ensure absolute compatibility with RFC 2616, for
>> reasons already stated. But in two respects we do go beyond RFC 2616:
>>
>> 1. We do not allow any comment before the first product token. For
>> example, you cannot say
>>
>> User-Agent: (yawn) Forte-Agent (shudder)
>>
>> on the grounds that there is supposed to be a convention that comments
>> refer to the product-token immediately preceding. I could live without
>> this (and leave it to common sense).
> I have made this change.
Um, I disagree with this. The comments were paired with the preceding
product. What does a comment before the product mean? User-Agent is not
for general comments.
>> since a product-token does not need to be parsed
>> or recognised by software, one might go further and allow even more
>> unstructured strings to be allowed (but that would be getting even
>> further from RFC 2616).
> No change made here.
Agreed. The product/version syntax is for parsing when collecting
information about agents being used. Loosen this and User-Agent just
becomes another synonym for X-Newsreader.
>> It seems agreed that this section is too verbose, but no-one has
>> accepted my invitation to prune it. Do you want me to try to do this?
> I have done a severe pruning. See diffs in a separate message.
I'll have to take a look at those. I object to the dropping of User-Agent:
inews and User-Agent: telnet from the examples. We need at least one
example of a version-less agent, and I think they are reasonable values for
the header.