235541 - w3.org - W3C Core StyleSheets wrongly detect Mozilla/Linux as NS4/X11

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[D. D. Brierton]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20040107

This feels so ironic posing a tech evangelism bug against the W3C.

However, the W3C have a set of Core StyleSheets which they encourage authors to
use. However, all of the stylesheets use browser sniffing. For example, if I
point Mozilla on Linux at:

http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/Modernist

the file returned (type text/css) says at the beginning:

"This stylesheet has been served in a form to avoid known bugs in your user
agent's css implementation. Copying and serving this stylesheet to other
agents may lead to unexpected results. Please refer to its address rather than
copy it."

And then the whole of the stylesheet is annotated with:

/* X11NS4 */

The trouble is that the stylesheet sent to Mozilla is greatly simplified from
the one sent to other browsers, and so if you are writing a page using one of
the Core StyleSheets and previewing it in Mozilla without checking it in other
browsers you're going to get a shock when you do.

I haven't been able to test whether this happens on other platforms, or whether
it is just Linux/X11 which is affected.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Nowhere man]

Today, with

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; fr; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041128 Firefox/1.0
(Debian package 1.0-4)

the stylesheet is annotated with

/* MacNS4.0 */

Comment 2

[Felix Miata]

Conforming summary to TFM item 10 at 
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/site/procedures.html#file-new

Comment 3

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

I get exactly the same stylesheet in Safari 3, Firefox 2, and Camino trunk when visiting that URL now. I think it's safe to mark this WORKSFORME, but since I don't have a way to test it on Linux, I'd prefer if someone who has Linux would be so kind as to test it first, then resolve it.

Comment 4

[Arun Prasannan (polar)]

The same stylesheet in SeaMonkey 1.1.9, SM trunk and Konqueror 4.0.3 here. Resolving worksforme.