XML Client detection

David Brownell david-b at pacbell.net
Tue Nov 2 19:20:42 GMT 1999


rev-bob at gotc.com wrote:
> 
> Does anyone have either (a) a partial list of XML-compliant browser UA
> strings or (b) a suggestion for an alternate approach?

Since your output choices are currently limited to HTML and XHTML, I'd
be sorely tempted to just default to XHTML, and give folk an option to
go to HTML output if that breaks.

The reason is that most reasonably well crafted XHTML will be accepted by
both HTML and XML aware browsers, with the primary known exception being
very old browsers ("version 2") that you may not support anyway.

You only really need XML support in the client if you're trying to use
the XML/CSS (or eventually XML/XSLT) style rendering.  Since I couldn't
use IE5 support for that (no list or link support, or preformatted text),
and Mozilla's not prime-time yet, I'd not bother with that approach for
some time to come.

- Dave

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