We shouldn't need a sniffer at all. W3C has to "enforce" their recommendation (is there?) concerning styles, layers, DOM of all levels... Netscape and Microsoft should go towards the users, not the money.

Actually, the sniffer is more for detecting versions of the browser, although it obviously is plenty capable of detecting whether it's IE for NS (or any of the others). Even if IE and NS were 100% compitable, version 5 would have more features than 4 (at least we would hope, never know w/MS) so the sniffer would still be needed.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that it would be nice if IE would support standards (especially the ones they wrote), but the Mozilla programers can only make Mozilla complient, not IE (although they're even trying to do the using ActiveX, aren't they talented....)

Is there any standard way to detect if a browser is fully <insert standard here> compliant?

I actually started using it a few weeks ago. It works pretty good. The only problem is that Opera minor revision numbers are not detected because for some reason the Opera developers decided not to put it in the navigator.appversion result but instead in the navigator.useragent.

Gag me.

I've been using (and telling other people to use) OBJECT detection instead of browser detection for the last couple of years. That solves 90% of the problem right there, avoids long strings of &&'ed statements and is backward- AND forward-compatible by definition. As a result, my JS and DHTML pages are ALREADY ready, and have been, since I wrote them...

:-)

They mention Opera 3.0. I wish them luck, but I honestly think they're going to really get mauled by Netscape 5.0, much more so than IE, (which at least has Windows users who would be quicker removing their own tonsils than trying to figure out how to in some way NOT use IE for something).

zontar,

If you get a moment, you should read that page at Netscape (the page with the UA detection code). The describe why they couldn't use object detection - it didn't work in IE3.

Opera is still providing a lot of features to Win 3.x platform and since there is no "offficial" support from Netscape for that platform anymore they'll do alright.

win 16 is only 10% of their market. But Opera will get mauled if they don't compete in the standards dept.

I used object detection for IE 3 especially for rollovers (detecting the Image object). What's the problem?

I used object detection for IE 3 especially for rollovers (detecting the Image object). What's the problem?

One instance where object detection completely fails is in the case of plug-in detection!!! You should for example be able to use something like this

if(navigator.plugins){ if(navigator.plugins["ShockWave"]){ // User has shockwave go to shockwave site } else{ // User doesn't have shockwave go to non-shocked site } } else{ // No plugin detection for this browser, ask the user!!! }

Now in a perfect world any browser that supported the plugins array would pass the object detection, and any one that didn't would fail allowing you to ask the user. However MS thought it would be clever, and instead of just skiping the pluggins array they pretend it works but simply return an empty collection. Inturn it passes the object detection, but fails the plugin detection because of lack of support.

Heheh, just thought I'd see if I could get a rise out of people. ;-)

Yes, I have read the linked page @ netscape.com. Yes, I realize there are times when object detection fails -- for instance, window.open() doesn't work correctly in NN2.X for Unix and Mac (but let's be honest here -- just how many of you still bother making that second call to the open() method to get around it? I'll bet there's not too many hands raised...), MSIE4.0/Mac doesn't support dynamic clipping of CSS layers, etc. There is also the problem of dealing with MSIE's "pretend" support of the plugins array -- for which, in the case of Flash, for instance, you wind up checking for the existence of several elements in the plugins array, and document.write()ing an EMBED tag into the page for MSIE. (Although, strictly speaking, that's still object detection rather than userAgent detection, n'est-ce pas?)

The point I was trying to make is that, IMNSHO, in many cases, object detection works just fine, and there are (& going to be) a lot of broken pages just because people detected specifically for MSIE4 instead of checking for document.all (I've hit several of them myself when using MSIE5). The document.images detection mentioned above is another case in point.

It just irks me to see people hollering about checking for every agent/version/platform under the sun in cases where it's not necessary, that's all. Almost as much as it irks me that people can't seem to see ahead far enough to use ">=" instead of "=". Believe me, I'm not knocking Netscape for trying to raise a little consciousness in this regard, and trying to avoid "This Netscape 5 is sure a crappy browser" when it's the fault of the aforementioned people who didn't bother to look ahead past the browser version they were using when they posted their pages...

Having susserated my little susseration, I will now slither back under the rock whence I came, that I might avoid the heat of further flames from the Mighty MozAdmin... <grin>

Actually the document.all and document.layers test are the most widely used method of checking for 4+ browser, but they are also the cause of many problems!!! For example the Mac and PC versions of IE4+ are different so using a simple document.all check will not do you any good. Not only that but IE4 and IE5 have compatibility issues that cause a simple document.all check to fail. Object checking is great for some things (like document.images) but browser checking is an inevitable part of writing JavaScript and will be for some time to come.

so? you do a if(document.all), then you do a if(navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac")==-1) in the parts concerning dynamic clipping or whatever... as if there's anyone who actually USES IE/Mac...

what are the IE 4 vs 5 compatibility problems you cite? and who's going to bother authoring for either one once NS 5 comes out anyway? heheheheheheheh

even if theres a devil or two in the details i think zontar does make a point. otherwise you guys wouldnt be getting so defensive about it.