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I understand the point about browser-specific instructions, but using the User-Agent to decide how to encode a file name sounds…wrong. Imagine your email client

I understand the point about browser-specific instructions, but using the User-Agent to decide how to encode a file name sounds…wrong. Imagine your email client checking the email client of the recipient to decide how to encode the file name of the file you attached – sure, it’s nice if it is possible, but in general, standards are supposed to be, well, standards, and not caring about broken software might help motivate vendors to fix it. And even for browser-specific instructions, it would make more sense in my opinion to let users choose the browser for which they want to see instructions[0]: The tool I use to query information is not necessarily the tool I need help with. A bicycle shop also doesn’t decide to only sell shoes or cars if you walk or drive there rather than arriving on a bicycle[1]. [0] I didn’t check Dropbox, so it might well be that they also give people a choice here. [1] Google’s PlayStore specifically annoyed me there recently as it didn’t let me view the description of an extension in Opera, telling me that I would need Chrome to download and use it – I do, but I’d like to know if this extension is worth installing Chrome or not beforehand.

jaytaylor 14y ago
I can vouch for the legitimacy of what he's saying. There are definitely cases where the only way to make browser download operations (whether it be a file download or certain kinds of XHR requests) work right in IE, Chrome, and FireFox is to write a special case for IE or potentially all 3 of them.
kijin 14y ago
> using the User-Agent to decide how to encode a file name sounds…wrong. Of course it's wrong, and web devs wouldn't have to do it in an ideal world. But when your Chinese users complain right now that their attachment names are getting jumbled, and when your conversion rate is going down right now because people don't run the files they've downloaded, does it really matter whose job it is to clean up Microsoft's mess? BTW, non-ASCII attachment names still come out weird from time to time because Outlook, Thunderbird, and various webmails follow different RFCs. Most email composing tools just use a compromise that works 99.9% of the time, but I've seen programs that let you customize the filename encoding.

jaytaylor 14y ago

I can vouch for the legitimacy of what he's saying. There are definitely cases where the only way to make browser download operations (whether it be a file download or certain kinds of XHR requests) work right in IE, Chrome, and FireFox is to write a special case for IE or potentially all 3 of them.

kijin 14y ago

> using the User-Agent to decide how to encode a file name sounds…wrong. Of course it's wrong, and web devs wouldn't have to do it in an ideal world. But when your Chinese users complain right now that their attachment names are getting jumbled, and when your conversion rate is going down right now because people don't run the files they've downloaded, does it really matter whose job it is to clean up Microsoft's mess? BTW, non-ASCII attachment names still come out weird from time to time because Outlook, Thunderbird, and various webmails follow different RFCs. Most email composing tools just use a compromise that works 99.9% of the time, but I've seen programs that let you customize the filename encoding.