What is an AS
...an autonomous system *(AS)* is a collection of
connected Internet Protocol *(IP)* routing prefixes
under the control of one or more network operators on
behalf of a single administrative entity or domain that
presents a common, clearly defined routing policy to the
Internet.Also I believe it's technically a violation of the HTTP spec to serve different GET requests to different user agents.
If it would be a violation to change things based on user agent, but the purpose of the user agent to specify how you want things changed, then...
if it was purely about different rendering of the exact same content, then wouldn’t it be the browsers responsibility (and thus UA is unecessary)
I have to imagine browsers are allowed to extend the spec, and UAs are either in theory or in practice a way to communicate those extensions; but because site operators were only specifically designating content for the major browser(s), any compliant but unlisted browser would never get that content.. and suddenly everyone was calling themselves netscape
Is this actually true?
For what it's worth, Google serves a completely different webpage to IE 5 (try it, they still support IE 5/6/etc) as opposed to a modern browser.
That's just presentation and layout though. Am I really not allowed to send different document content to different UAs?
I guess it goes to show how much we take connectivity and uptime for granted these days.