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bug#18812: 24.4; url.el user agent does not include Emacs version
From: |
Ivan Shmakov |
Subject: |
bug#18812: 24.4; url.el user agent does not include Emacs version |
Date: |
Fri, 24 Oct 2014 19:17:48 +0000 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux) |
>>>>> "TZ" == Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
>>>>> On Thu, 23 Oct 2014 21:19:21 -0400 Stefan Monnier wrote:
PH> The url.el functions for making HTTP requests set the User-Agent
PH> header to "URL/Emacs" which is not very descriptive. It would be
PH> helpful to include the Emacs version, at least.
SM> Other people feel like it's already too descriptive. Why should
SM> all Emacs users constantly tell the whole world exactly which Emacs
SM> version they're running?
TZ> Web browsers do. It helps web developers and is not particularly
TZ> sensitive if only the major.minor version is used (without too much
TZ> detail).
Web browsers (and HTTP/HTTPS clients in general) also provide a
way for the user to override the default User-Agent: value, and
I believe that Emacs should allow for that, too.
While somewhat tangential to the problem as reported, some of
the issues I’ve seen with the default User-Agent: settings are:
• Lynx’ default User-Agent: includes ‘libwww’ as a substring;
apparently, some Web sites mistake that for the well-known
Perl library of the same name, and thus reject the requests;
the solution is to either manually remove the respective
stanza, or to disable User-Agent: altogether;
• other sites are known to disallow HTTP requests /without/
User-Agent:, however;
• GNU Wget default identification is also not unknown to be
rejected; per my experience, using something like “tegW/1.15”
instead (via --user-agent=) tends to resolve the issue;
• moreover, some sites actually serve different content
depending on User-Agent:, – apparently for “SEO” purposes; for
instance, a PDF file is served for a request from a party
identifying itself as a search engine, while regular browsers
get a Web page with a (presumably non-free) JavaScript-based
PDF reader set up for that file instead.
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