Understanding the Parent Property's Purpose

[Shane Walker]

I'm hoping someone can help me out here. I'm trying to understand the original intention of the Parent property and how it should be handled going forward.

I believe the original intention was to use it for major browser versions. However, with the release of Firefox 5.0 Mozilla went to a rapid release cycle, Chrome has been using a similar release cycle from the start, and the field is no longer updated with every major version change.

So, the question is, what was the original intention behind the property and how should it be handled going forward? Should it just be the major browser engine name? Where do we draw the line, are Chrome and Safari considered WebKit?

I hope I can get some good input about this from Gary and the rest of you guys about this.

[Gary K]

Its purpose is to aid in assigning default values to a group of similar user agent patterns such as "IE 10.0". Mentioning the Parent on any user agent pattern's properties sheet will cause all browscap properties to assume the values defined -- using our "IE 10.0" example -- in the block of code named,  "IE 10.0". Basically it sets the default property values of user agents and then you can fine-tune a specific user agent property as needed.

I'm not good at explaining things so I hope that made sense.