| The Client Statistics Gatherer | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
With all the privacy freaks clamoring today about how people are tracking your every move, you would think getting data like this is easy. After all, I could, right now on this very page, tell you things like your IP address, your operating system, your browser type, and that your middle name is not Zathras. All of this information is sent by your web browser every time you request a page, and is stored in web server logs that most respectable web hosting providers will let me plunder with impunity.
Unfortunately, things like your screen resolution and color palette are not included in that information, which means you have to be asked for it. And you have to ask on the client-side, using something like JavaScript. Server-side scripting languages won't work: they only kick in before anything is sent to the client, and don't handle getting something back from the client behind the scenes, unless you go through a lot of hoops, usually proprietary.
Now, it turns out, this part of the problem isn't hard, as there are several existing "solutions" to the problem of how to collect this data. First, I want to grip about some methods that I've either seen or considered, but wasn't satisfied with.