[REBOL] Re: REBOL Web Browser Plugin (Alpha)
From: gjones05:mail:orion at: 11-Jun-2001 15:13
From: Sterling
> A _real_ plugin would draw directly into the browser
> window. That is a lot harder than this simple plugin
> that we have devised. We do want to do the complete
> plugin but thought that tossing this out to the community
> would be a good first step. The benefit you get with the
> plugin even now is that you can use an <EMBED ...>
> tag in you HTML page and you can get a REBOL
> program to pop up as yo uview the page. This also
> bypasses the blank page/stranded browser problem.
> You can't do this with a simple file association nor does
> it seem that the plugin can handle both situations by itself
> though we may be missing something.
Hi, Sterling,
Sorry to continue to flagellate the equine post-mortem, but I really do believe
it is possible to have it both ways. Last summer I grew curious about how
RealPlayer could run the BigBrother feeds as either embeded app or as a separate
pop-up. They used RealPlayer technology, and their default page for Internet
Explorer used the RealPlayer in an embeded state. I picked apart the HTML and
javascript used, and discovered that the same exact link could be used for
either embeded app or pop-up. To demonstrate this point, I'll forward the HTML
page that contains *both* methods on the same page using the same link.
The html code does not survive line wrapping very well, so I will forward the
sample file as an attachment to your rebol address so that you can see how it
works. The show, is of course, over, but AOL still pipes a standard little
intro feed to what was line 1, so that is what I included.
RealPlayer appears to use an (overly-) ActiveX object that can accept feeds
directly as an embeded app or through href links as a pop-up. Neat idea for the
0.2 alpha.
--Scott Jones
