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Re: [Lynx-dev] Standard headers


From: David Woolley
Subject: Re: [Lynx-dev] Standard headers
Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2019 12:26:59 +0000
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.2.2

On 28/11/2019 06:10, address@hidden wrote:
I also want you to change Useragent to standard
format like "Mozilla/5.0 (Lynx; Win64)".

That is very definitely not a standard format. That claims the browser really is version 5.0 of Mozilla, and just adds Lynx and Win64 as comments.

The standard format is a list of tokens and versions, and, if you have a web site crawled by a crawler, I think you will still see user agents in that format.

The reason that people use the non-standard format you describe was discrimination against Internet Explorer in its early days. Microsoft spoofed Netscape as its identity (but kept the proper identity as a comment) to trick web sites into thinking it was Netscape.

The original mobile browsers used to follow the proper standard, and did, actually, have multiple token/version strings in their identities.

If you send Mozilla/* as the user agent, you are likely to get unusable pages, even from sites that try to be universal.



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