Linux plugin functional?

Lex Spoon squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Sat Sep 21 15:14:55 UTC 2002


Michael Rueger <m.rueger at acm.org> wrote:
> But lucky for us, out of the over 400(!) browsers the server identified 
> so far, 98% are supported ;-)
> 
> And to be honest, I'm not trying to be more perfect than commercial web 
> sites that have people who get paid to do this kind of job.
> 

How about defaulting to using standard W3 stuff if the server doesn't
understand the browser string?  Alternatively, one could use the
approach of just *trying* the different API's until something works. 
Just some ideas--I don't know specifically what the server needs to be
sending back, so these approaches might or might not work.

Oh, and incidentally, we don't *have* to use plugin tags at all.  All
browsers nowadays will auto-pluginize content whenever they can.  For
example, whenever I click on a PDF file in Galeon, IE, Opera, Netscape,
or Mozilla (just to name the ones I've used at all recently), it comes
up inside the browser window.  So another option is to send back a file
containing the parameters and to let the plugin-runner parse that file
itself.

Intuitively,  it just seems like the server shouldn't *need* much
smarts.  It just needs to send back the right plugin-invocation HTML. 
While there are two ways to do this in HTML, you can surely nest them
without problem--the text inside both <object> and <plugin> is ignored
by browsers that understand the tag.  Once the plugin is started, the
*plugin* can do any necessary magic and can check for what API's are
available, etc.  This is much easier than doing it on the server,
because there can be a different plugins compiled for each different
browser, whenever it is necessary.  Yes, this pushes the problem over to
getting the right plugin installed, but we already have that issue,
anyway.

Okay, I'll stop here, but barely.  Let me just point out that the 2% of
people being rejected are the more sophisticated ones.  They are
basically being told that McDonalds is good enough for everyone else.


-Lex


PS -- is the code for all this available anywhere?  If so, maybe someone
might get heated enough to implement an alternative.



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list