mplayerplug-in and trailers at Apple.com

[Tim]

On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 17:27 -0400, fred smith wrote:
> My guess is they've got some test explicitly for the quicktime player,
> as distinct from merely checking if you can play quicktime media. (I 
> don't know enough of web programming to know how one would do that, so
> I may be all wet.) 

The proper way to do that is via the accept header.  Along with a
request, the browser sends a list of what MIME types it can accept (with
prioritising for dealing multiple filetypes offering for the same
content), which it should keep up to date with its own abilities as well
as its plugins.

However, that fails badly thanks to MSIE, surprise, surprise, stuffing
it up for itself and everyone else.  MSIE proclaims to accept */* MIME
types (i.e. everything), and also claims not to accept favicons (it's
own invention).

The wrong way to do is is things like:

Checking which browser that you use, and if it's not on the shortlist,
rejecting it.  Of course, the shortlist bears no relation to the reality
of what the browsers can do, and newer browsers often get rejected
because they're not on the list.

Checking whether you've got scripting enabled, or a that a certain
scripting command does something.  Often something unrelated to the real
need, it's just another way of (badly) shortlisting some browsers.

Webmasters ever were a bunch of people underserving of the title 
"master" in anything...

-- 
[tim at bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr
2.6.23.15-80.fc7 i686 i386

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