Unrelated things.

1. Went to the dentist, spent 3.5 hours getting a tooth extracted and a bone graft put in. Am in agonizing pain, now muted by Vicodin.

2. Way back in Telnet days, clients and servers knew how to autonegotiate their capabilities. Will you echo characters back? No, you have to do that. Can you change your window size? Sure. Can you move your cursor anywhere on screen? No, only forward, backward, down and return to start. That sort of thing.

Why don't modern browsers advertise their capabilities explicitly? Instead of guessing, we could have:

HTTP 1.x GET http://smart.server.example.com/info/
CAPABLE=EcmaScript 1.3, JRE 1.6, Flash 7, CSS 1.0, Pipeline 32

instead of the silly "I'm a Mozilla 5.0 browser! Guess whether I'm really Gecko-based or just foolin'!" that we seem to have now.

Unrelated things.

1. Went to the dentist, spent 3.5 hours getting a tooth extracted and a bone graft put in. Am in agonizing pain, now muted by Vicodin.

2. Way back in Telnet days, clients and servers knew how to autonegotiate their capabilities. Will you echo characters back? No, you have to do that. Can you change your window size? Sure. Can you move your cursor anywhere on screen? No, only forward, backward, down and return to start. That sort of thing.

Why don't modern browsers advertise their capabilities explicitly? Instead of guessing, we could have:

HTTP 1.x GET http://smart.server.example.com/info/
CAPABLE=EcmaScript 1.3, JRE 1.6, Flash 7, CSS 1.0, Pipeline 32

instead of the silly "I'm a Mozilla 5.0 browser! Guess whether I'm really Gecko-based or just foolin'!" that we seem to have now.