When working with the BrowserHawk Editor, you will primarily be dealing with browsers, properties, folders, and filters. This section provides an overview of these objects and how they are used in BrowserHawk.
The most important object you will work with in the BrowserHawk Editor is the Browser. For simplicity, a browser refers to any software that may be used to retrieve web pages from your server. For example, a search engine is defined in BrowserHawk as a Browser, although in general it would normally be referred to as a crawler, etc.
BrowserHawk provides detailed browser capability information for each browser defined. This is done through a series of properties that are defined in your BDF and assigned appropriate values. All browsers and folders share the same set of properties.
Properties are the most essential element of BrowserHawk. They provide an easy way for you to determine whether a browser supports a specific capability or not. There are over 40 different properties tracked by cyScape’s maindefs.bdf file. Each property corresponds to a specific browser capability. For example, the property "Tables" provides information on whether a browser supports HTML tables. And the property "MouseOver" tells you whether the browser can safely produce the "mouse over" effect of changing an image to something different when the mouse is placed over an image (using a popular JavaScript technique).
Folder objects are created in the BrowserHawk Editor as well, and their use is highly recommended. Folders provide an intuitive way to group browsers within the same family or from the same manufacturer together visually. They also provide a quick and effective way for you to create new browsers that have similar property settings.
Another very powerful feature of BrowserHawk is its support of "filters". Filters allow you to dynamically set properties based on keywords and characters that may be contained in a user agent, cookie, or server environment variable. A filter is applied globally – meaning that once you set up a filter, it is checked and enforced for every defined browser automatically. The true power in using Filters is that it provides you with unprecedented accuracy and flexibility in recognizing important property information contained in the user agent string, without causing the need to define these conditions over and over for each Browser as was required with browscap.ini.
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