Any utilities to remove the ALL the Microsoft formatting tags?

[William Tasso]

...which surely is the easiest route.

certainly seems to be the route of least resistance. I guess it depends on
how well one sleeps at night. It does seem that there are lots of folk
building pages the hard way.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

I find it rather instructive that so many web authors appear to
believe that IE is in need of having web pages constructed
specifically for itself: they must believe that it's incapable of
browsing web pages that have been made for the World Wide Web.

They believe it because it is true. Currently my 'adjustments for agents
other than Presto and Gecko' list is quite small:

- send as text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml

- omit the XML prologue and XML-stylesheet linking instructions (this
will kick IE6/Win into standards mode)

I do it by sniffing the 'Accept' header rather than 'User-Agent' though,
which is hopefully more reliable and more flexible (i.e. when Microsoft
finally get their heads around XHTML they'll probably start sending
'application/xhtml+xml' in their Accept header too.)

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

I do it by sniffing the 'Accept' header rather than 'User-Agent' though,

An excellent web engineering principle, indeed

which is hopefully more reliable and more flexible (i.e. when Microsoft
finally get their heads around XHTML they'll probably start sending
'application/xhtml+xml' in their Accept header too.)

I'll believe that when I see it, but at least if they asked for it
then they'll get what they asked for, and have no grounds to complain.

After all, when they're fetching <img src=...> at the moment they send
me Accept: */*, so I'm happy to send them anything that I feel like.
But can they cope with it? Of course not. They never really did
grok HTTP, and I don't suppose they ever will.

 

[karim]

If I want to know if your browser is Moxilla, somewhere in the ua it
should have 'Mozilla'. True or False? False. The default User-Agent
from MSIE includes 'Mozilla'.

If I want to know if your browser is MSIE, somewhere in the ua it
should have 'MSIE'. True or False? False. The default User-Agent
from Opera includes 'MSIE'.

If I want to know if your browser is Opera, somewhere in the ua it
should have 'Opera'. True or False? False. The default User-Agent
from Loki includes 'Opera'.

If I want to know if your browser is Loki, somewhere in the ua it
should have 'Loki'. True or False? False. The default User-Agent
from Yaqui includes 'Loki'.

If I want to know if your browser is Yaqui, ...

Like I said before, the ua has enough information to determine which
browser it is. If it contains opera and msie, it's opera and it's not ie.
If it contains msie and mozilla it's msie and not mozilla and so on.
Loki and similar browsers that use ua's with insufficient data are
misleading. Maybe it's one of those browsers that uses another browser's
engine, I think it's ok if the ua has the main browser type.

Anyone can create their own browser by easily plugging in the IE browser
control and name their browser Johnny's browser. I as a webmaster want to
see IE in my logs instead of 'Johnny'.

Karim

 

[karim]

Because the pages don't obey html standards?

Wouldn't it be easier to switch to another browser momentarily just for
that problematic site than messing with the UA then switching it back after
you're done?

Karim

 

[Mark Parnell]

Wouldn't it be easier to switch to another browser momentarily just
for
that problematic site than messing with the UA then switching it back
after you're done?

If they are blocking anything other than IE, and you are running *nix, for
example, you are supposed to switch to IE _how_ exactly?

 

[Goran Larsson]

Like I said before, the ua has enough information to determine which
browser it is.

With the plurality of User-Agent strings in use today it requires AI to
make a good guess. The simple ad-hoc string matching used by sites today
can never be sure if their guess is right.

If it contains opera and msie, it's opera and it's not ie.

It could be Loki saying that it is compatible with Opera, just like
Opera is saying that it is compatible with MSIE and MSIE is saying
that it is compatible with Mozilla -- or perhaps not.

Loki and similar browsers that use ua's with insufficient data are
misleading.

Lynx/2.7.1 (somewhat compatible with Mozilla, MSIE, Opera) libwww-FM/2.14

Is this misleading?
What browser could it be?
What browser will it be detected as?

 

[David Venn-Brown]

Lynx/2.7.1 (somewhat compatible with Mozilla, MSIE, Opera) libwww-FM/2.14

Is this misleading?
What browser could it be?
What browser will it be detected as?

Yaqui of course

 

[Chris Morris]

Do they ramdonly make up an identity or you're going to have to change it
yourself?

Varies. Some let you select from a list (or have a plugin that lets
you), some let you do free text entry (or have a plugin that lets
you), some do both.

 

[J.S. Ferguson]

Hi

Know any good utilities to help me strip out the tags that
Microsoft Excel 2002 leaved behind when you try
and export an HTML format file?

This is driving me NUTS.
And really makes me hate microsoft with a passion.

Good

I literally just want "compact HTML" - ie just the data,
plus the minimal table structure
and *NO FORMATTING CODES* of any sort!!

I did have a utility but it was on my previous PC
and I cant remember what it was called.

I would be prepared to pay no more than say GBP 10.00
for such a utility (which I only need every couple of months...)

Perhaps jedit http://jedit.org/ with the jtidy and xml plugins would do the trick?