[X4U] Re: Re: Leopard Issues - Some Responses (Stroller)

[Jon Warms]

Stroller-

Usually, I agree with your postings, especially the ones that involve
elbow-bending. But you're wrong here.

Apple changed the interface behavior between the two releases.
They must have done this, because it affects every browser I
throw at it. Even old Netscape acts differently under 10.5 than it
did on earlier releases, and Netscape hasn't changed in years.

Don't bother reminding me that if something is left unspecified,
it isn't guaranteed not to change. Browser behavior leads to
habits that have to be changed. In the general scheme of things,
not a big deal, but also it's not clearly necessary.

You define "correct behavior". Huh? Domain guessing, as I
understood it, simply added "www" and ".com" to each incomplete
url, before the net even saw that. Incidentally, the option to
use domain guessing is an explicit choice in Netscape's prefs
(under a different name). (At one time, Eugene would break in
here and tell us what was indeed correct.)

As far as man is concerned, my point was that man is a superb
ref manual and a lousy textbook. I don't have time to parse
the explanations of the two commands until I understand them.
Maybe when I retire.

I'd post the results of dig if I thought it would help answer my
questions, but dig deals with DNS results. I accept the answers
about the DNS results and how Verizon gets involved.

As you say, between releases Apple may choose to respond
differently to the error messages, and this is exactly my point.
As I now understand it, one of two things happened when the
browser saw an incomplete url. Either it a) recognized the url as
incomplete and immediately fixed it, or b) submitted the
incomplete url to the router, and when it failed, fixed the
url. I had thought (a) was what happened, but maybe (b) was;
either way, the browser now never fixes the url but
keeps trying for a valid result. Why do you
sit back and tell me this is the master's decision and I should
just relax and enjoy it?

On Dec 5, 2007, Stroller <macmonster at myrealbox.com> wrote:

> On 5 Dec 2007, at 05:26, Jon wrote:
>> ...The last posters are pretty convincing that Verizon is doing the
>> dirty deed & diverting invalid urls to feed their click revenue.
>>
>> But that doesn't fit the facts that I observe and have reported.
>> ....
>>
> Just because 10.4 and 10.4 are behaving differently, doesn't mean
> it's all Apple's fault. I think that was your original assumption &
> that you understand otherwise now.
>
> On computer functions there are often multiple error conditions. When
> we talk about DNS we're talking about commands which ask a computer
> to look up the IP address associated with a domain name - there might
> be an error type for the server to say "address doesn't exist",
> another for it to say ... and so on.
>
> Under 10.3 Apple may well have responded one way to one of these
> error messages and chosen to respond differently in 10.4 - that
> doesn't mean the new behaviour is wrong, it could just be that it
> substantiates Verizon's incorrect configuration as it didn't (to you)
> before.
>
> It seems pretty clear (to me) that the correct behaviour at an o/s
> level is for the host "jr" to be "not found". I'd expect a simple web-
> browser should return a "404" error or similar in response to this
> (like they all did in the old days) but as browsers have become more
> sophisticated they have been designed to produce more "user friendly"
> results. This difference is illustrated by the way Internet Explorer
> goes to the Windows Live Search results for "jr", whereas another
> browser adds the "www." and ".com". A search page might actually be
> more useful in many cases than adding the "www." and ".com" - if
> you'd typed "ib" or "ib.com" instead of "ibm", for example.
>
>> I ran the port and dig commands, but I don't understand enough
>> about them
>> yet. ...
>
> Well, the great thing about commands in a terminal window is that you
> can copy & paste them into emails to show us the results they gave
> and allow people to explain them for you.
>
> man pages tend to be actually really good & useful, but unfortunately
> it's a acquired skill learning how to read them. man pages are long
> ...