INTERNET-DRAFT Charles H. Lindsey Usenet Format Working Group University of Manchester April 2001
6.18. User-Agent The User-Agent header contains information about the user agent (typically a newsreader) generating the article, for statistical purposes and tracing of standards violations to specific software needing correction. Although not one of the mandatory headers, posting agents SHOULD normally include it. User-Agent-content = product-token *( CFWS product-token ) product-token = value ["/" product-version] ; see 4.1 product-version = value This header MAY contain multiple product-tokens identifying the agent and any subproducts which form a significant part of the posting agent, listed in order of their significance for identifying the application. Product-tokens should be short and to the point - they MUST NOT be used for information beyond the canonical name of the product and its version. Injecting agents MAY include product information for servers (such as "INN/1.7.2"), but serving and relaying agents MUST NOT generate or modify this header to list themselves. NOTE: Variations from [RFC 2616] which describes a similar facility for the HTTP protocol: 1. use of arbitrary text or octets from character sets other than US-ASCII in a product-token may require the use of a quoted-string, 2. "{" and "}" are allowed in a value (product-token and product-version) in Netnews, 3. UTF-8 replaces ISO-8859-1 as charset assumption. NOTE: Comments should be restricted to information regarding the product named to their left such as platform information and should be concise. Use as an advertising medium (in the mundane sense) is discouraged.[Previous Up Next]
See also previous draft (03): 6.16. User-Agent
See also previous draft (02): 6.14 User-Agent
See also previous draft (son-of-1036):
See also previous draft (rfc-1036):