Browsers

One complication of the Web is that people are free to choose their own browsers, and not all browsers work alike or even nearly alike. They vary enormously in their capabilities. Some browsers display images; others won’t. Some that display images won’t display frames, tables, Java, and so on.

You can try to circumvent this problem by asking the customer to go to different parts of your script (“Click here to see the frames version”), but in real life people often do not know what their browser will and won’t do. A lot of them will not even understand what question you are asking. To get around this problem, Apache can detect the browser type and set environment variables so that your CGI scripts can detect the type and act accordingly.

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