I was reading a story on A List Apart about sniffing browsers to determine what level of PNG support they have. It got me wondering...
1. Will Xoops2 implement a browser sniffer?
2. If so, which file is it in, if someone wants to tweak it?
3. If not, which file would it be best to add it to... perhaps a skin file?

If there are not plans to have a sniffer built-in, it just seemed to me like a nice check-box feature that one could enable if they needed to. If it exposed a standard set of variables in Xoops, then module developers could look to that standard set when features don't work the same in all browsers (such as WYSIWYG editing).

In my case, I am mostly interested in it to be able to know which browsers I can offer transparent PNG, non-transparent PNG, or ancient GIF to.

Anyways, if you have suggestions for which file is best suited for having the sniffer code copied into it, that would be great. Otherwise, I hope the links are interesting and useful.

Browser Detect Lite

Ultimate Client Sniffer

A List Apart: Cross-Browser PNG Transparency

No, there still will be no standardized browser sniffing codes in XOOPS2, but only in some parts we try to detect if the client is using IE or not before adding some IE specific http header variables.

I see that those links you've suggested are all javascript codes, so include/xoopsjs.php might be the right file to include the codes, if you need to do a site-wide sniffing.

You can also consider using native PHP functions like get_browser() or simply looking at the values of $HTTP_USER_CLIENT the client sends to the server.

By the way, I have come into the following script when I was searching for a good php sniffer script some time ago, and it looked very good.
phpClientSniffer

onokazu,
Thanks for taking the time to look at that. I think you are right, PHP would be the better choice (for those pesky people who turn off JS... like me ).
Thanks for the link.

I'm sure that some time between Xoops2 and XoopsFinal, I will take the time to re-write this for the Feature Request forum. I know you all have bigger fish to fry at the present time.
Thanks again.

I came across this professional sniffer (property detector) from cyscape.com called BrowserHawk or Bhawk.

I thought it had a nice feature list for comparison to other sniffers mentioned in this thread.

Unfortunately, it is not free:

http://cyscape.com/products/bhawk/features.asp