[pmwiki-users] 404 on Abort?

H. Fox haganfox at users.sourceforge.net
Sun Jan 7 11:57:26 CST 2007


On 1/6/07, porneL <mailinglist at pornel.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 07 Jan 2007 00:56:54 -0000, H. Fox
> <haganfox at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>
> > On Windows servers the first three letters of the PHP_OS constant are
> > "WIN"
>
> But that's OS on which PHP is running and it has absolutely nothing to do
> with OS of clients that connect to it.

That's correct, but it's the server's OS that's important, not the
client's.  Pm wrote:

   But if we change the error code to
   be something other than "200 OK",
   then Internet Explorer and IIS will
   often replace these error messages
   with their own "friendly" versions of
   the same message,

IIS runs on Windows only, so if PmWiki returns a "200 OK" status code
on Windows servers IIS can never replace a wiki administrator's
carefully-crafted error page with a "friendlier" one.

> > I think all recent version of IE have "MSIE" in the user agent
>
> This is very unreliable.

That's OK.  It's more than reliable enough.

> There are other browsers and bots that have MSIE
> in their user-agent header.

I hadn't considered bots.  Is that of any concern?  If so, please
explain what I'm missing.

Isn't sending 400, 403, etc. status codes to *some* bots better than
sending them to none?

Put another way, bots that don't send "MSIE[space][digit]" in their
user agent string would get customizable "400 Bad Request" and "403
Forbidden" responses, when appropriate.  Bots that do have
"MSIE[space][digit]" get the same, slightly inappropriate "200 OK" as
now.  No harm done.

Which non-IE browsers have "MSIE[space][digit]" in their user agent string?

I'm not sure that even matters.  The issue is the same with browsers
as with bots.  It would be better to send a Site.Error403 page at
least sometimes.  It's a way to enhance the visitor's experience and
communicate more accurately with bots with almost no adverse effect
compared to the alternative.

Hagan




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