[OT] Help with question about web page access

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Mon Aug 16 17:46:20 2004

On Mon, 2004-08-16 at 22:27, O. Sharp wrote:
> Jerome H. Fine wrote, in part:

> Hard to say without seeing the web-site in question, but at the least
> (from your description) it sound like they haven't got their various
> "what-browsers-are-acceptable" pages in sync. I'd be annoyed if I were
> you. :)

I'd be annoyed if I were me, too. Wait - I *am* me! :-)

> We're moving our library around, so my relevant books are hiding; but
> from memory, yes, it's possible. HTTP requests are sent with a handful of
> environmental variables, including brand and version of the browser
> making the request.

USER_AGENT rings a bell for some reason, but I could be making that up.
Somewhere on the web exists a site where when you visit the page it just
dumps out all the data sent by your browser to the server. Unfortunately
I never ever bookmark it because each time I need it I never think I'll
need it again - d'oh! Anyone?

> <rant>
> O'course, I've long held the opinion that - except in the cases of
> multimedia-bells-and-whistles websites, which are by their nature heavily
> dependent on what the receiving browser can handle - designing a site
> that requires "Browser X" to be readable is both counterproductive and
> against the site's own interest. Why put together a web presence at all
> if you're going to bar a bunch of potential readers from seeing it at
> the outset? Why make an effort to communicate your message to the world if
> you're simultaneously going to put up a technology barrier to make sure
> half the people you're trying to reach can't access it? If you're going to
> write something, don't you want people to _read_ it?
> </rant>

Yep, you and a huge amount of other people - unfortunately it hasn't
filtered through to the moron brigade it seems (who typically code for
and test on IE, probably using Frontpage in the process... ugh)

> Anyway, it may be simplest to just bite the damnable lead bullet and get
> a browser upgrade. Mozilla's Firefox may be the way to go:

Didn't Jerome imply that he couldn't upgrade or install anything
different on this platform?

Otherwise, yes I agree. My personal favourite's Opera as the download is
tiny compared to other modern browsers, plus you can tell it to identify
itself to a remote server as a few different browsers which can help
access broken sites. And it's incredibly fast at page rendering.

By the way Jerome, are you sure that you haven't just got some junk left
in your browser's cache (cookies or content) that are causing problems?
The fact that you said you can authenticate against the site and bring
the initial page up but then not see any content beyond that could also
be down to a cache problem. Try shift-reload on an offending page and
see what it does if you haven't already; from memory with that version
of Netscape it should force a reload of the page from the server.

cheers

Jules
Received on Mon Aug 16 2004 - 17:46:20 BST