What is DigExt in the IE browser agent string?

george

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Sep 13, 2001, 5:41:40 PM9/13/01

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Hello,

I heard that the "DigEx" tag is appended to the IE browser
agent string when users enable or use offline browsing to
download updates from a web site for later reading.

Can somebody confirm this? I've looked for this info in a
lot of places but have not been able to find anything.

Ideally, I would like to block my visitors from using
the "Make available offline" feature of IE on my site. If
this tag is unique to that situation, then I can block
access by the user agent using a custom ISAPI filter.

Any help or pointers on this greatly appreciated!!
Thanks,

George

Owen

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Sep 13, 2001, 6:17:44 PM9/13/01

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Never thought about it, but I can't see it being due to offline content. I
would take a guess that it means the user is dialling up through a digital
phone exchange (as opposed to an analog exchange, cable, etc).

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geroge fox

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Sep 14, 2001, 7:27:08 AM9/14/01

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Thanks for the reply.

Actually, all the information I've found on the net indicated that DigExt is related to IE running in "crawler" mode when pages that get bookmarked with the "make available offline" option.

I've checked my logs, and it seems to be true as I can see this agent downloading content very fast with no wait.

The following posts have more detailed info:

http://www.mail-archive.com/mod...@apache.org/msg00835.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/mod...@apache.org/msg00845.html

Now, what I would like to know is whether the "DigExt" tag is present only when the browser is in "crawler" mode, or whether is present at all times or on other special circumstances.

Thanks,
George.

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Owen

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Sep 14, 2001, 11:59:41 AM9/14/01

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It has nothing to do with offline browsing, but rather with MSIE 5.x on a
Win 98 machine and maybe on NT.
I have checked my own logs, and I get this when I view my site! Also,
checking on some other sites the same thing comes up. I would guess that it
is some kind of idetifier that MS have put in their IE 5.x browsers.
Now people may be downloading your site for offline viewing, but that is not
what causes the "digext" to appear in the log file. (Probably why the guy
in the links you included said his users were a bit upset when he blocked
their access!).

Interesting though. Pity no-one seems to know, and I guess MS isn't jumping
in here to explain. Seems like the people who are asking and answering are
just making guesses - no-one knows for sure.

Owen
desi...@xswebs.com
www.xswebs.com

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Owen

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Sep 14, 2001, 12:07:57 PM9/14/01

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Also seen it for Win'95 and NT.
(Just so you know it isn't operating system specific).
Seems the only constant is that it is a version of MSIE 5.x
Not just 5.0 as I saw someone say - seen it for 5.01 as well.

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