NYCPHP Meetup

[Chris Shiflett]

--- Jerry Kapron <jkapron at newageweb.com> wrote:
> >Why would it matter if these other sites have a button instead of a link?
> 
> It does not matter on the back end part of the system, but it does in
> general, trust me. I can't tell you more. I just wish there was a way to
> detect it on the back end.

Well, maybe this will help. I created the following test page, http.php:

<p><a href="./http.php">Link</a></p>
<form action="./http.php" method="get">
<input type="submit">
</form>

When I click the link, my Web browser sends this:

GET /~chris/http.php HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020830
Accept:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,video/x-mng,image/png,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,text/css,*/*;q=0.1
Accept-Language: en-us, en;q=0.50
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1, utf-8;q=0.66, *;q=0.66
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://127.0.0.1/~chris/http.php

When I click the submit button, my Web browser sends this:

GET /~chris/http.php HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020830
Accept:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,video/x-mng,image/png,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,text/css,*/*;q=0.1
Accept-Language: en-us, en;q=0.50
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1, utf-8;q=0.66, *;q=0.66
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://127.0.0.1/~chris/http.php

Of course, I can also telnet directly to the Web server and type the request
in, so that's three different ways to generate the exact same request.

> That's not really important.  I'm stuck with one specific thing: the
> ability to determine whether the request came from an <a href> link or a
> form.

As my example shows, this is really impossible. You cannot detect it based on
the request itself, so you're going to have to think outside of the box. Since
it is the authors of the Web sites you are worried about, perhaps the only
viable solution is for you to check up on them with an automated script of some
type, much like you were describing.

Sorry I can't help more. I must admit that I am really curious why it could
possibly matter. :-)

Chris

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