content based on UA

gotissues68

Hola board!
I'm currently working on a project where I'd like to load certain content based on UA (user agent)

I have the following line in my code.

if($_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT][blah]){
echo '@import url(../css/bluerob.css);';
}else{
echo '@import url(../css/blue_test.css);';
}

Since IE and Opera don't correctly interpret the style sheets but Moz does I'd like to be able to lessen my work by just loading the correct style sheet. However the code above is not working as it is always loading the first style sheet regardless of what the user agent is, or what the argument to the if statement is. Am I doing something syntactically wrong?

Thanks
Drew

steadyguy

Well ... for starters, it looks like you're just checking to see if the user sent you their UA, and not examining the UA string to see what it contains.

Btw, browsers can lie. 🙁 Opera, and Mozilla/Firebird can both send a fake UA string. With Mozilla, you have to install the PrefBar extension, but this feature is built into Opera, and readily accessible.

gotissues68

Good point, so the question becomes how can I test to see what was sent without using a Javascript re-direct. I'd prefer to have just multiple css files instead of multiple index/content pages and additional css files to boot.

steadyguy

You can't, really ... because the user can also disable JS, and the only way you can tell what they're using is by what they tell you. And IE even calls itself Mozilla, though there's an 'MSIE' tucked away in there, too ...

Besides, different browser versions have different ways of mangling CSS rules, anyway ... so I decided a while ago to just give up on trying to hand out different stylesheets based on browsers - because even though it takes a bit (ok, maybe a lot) more time to compose a cross-browser stylesheet, it has made my life infinitely easier, freed me of a lot of worries, and dramatically improved my CSS skills, and I still have most of my hair, too. 🆒 It'll be tough, but this might actually be your easiest option.

gotissues68

Thanks for your reply 🙂 Yea I dig on dealing with loss of hair and how browsers tend to treat style sheets. I've figured it out without the use of javascript (thereby passing the fact that someone might have disabled it) and getting the result I more or less expected. Saves me some time and frustration, not so much that I can't deal with the fact that it looks "different" but the fact that its there and I must resolve it! I guess I'm a bit obsessive that way heh.

Here's what I did, I got the inspiration based on some code I found at www.codewalkers.com.

$browser = "Gecko";
$browser1 = "Konqueror";
if(strstr ($_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT], $browser)){
echo '@import url(../css/bluerob.css);';
}elseif(strstr ($_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT], $browser1)){
echo '@import url(../css/bluerob.css);';
}
else {
echo '@import url(../css/blue_test.css);';
}
[code=php]

I've singled out Konq and Moz because I know they render correctly and test based on that, seeing that according to my webstats people are either using Moz or IE or another gecko based engine within their browser its easy to say ok, based on either a gecko or konq or IE scenario do this.. So I don't have create either an array or set a variable for each browser specifically which is nice :) Since opera renders the same way IE does.