Bryan Van Vliet wrote
- Plug-in support in Internet Explorer is incomplete. It doesn't support the EMBED tag option "type=", ... - Sites would need 2 sets of documents, one supporting the EMBED (plug-in) command and one supporting the OBJECT (ActiveX) command. ...> - Sites would likely support two types of scripting, JavaScript and VBScript ... This is going to be quite a problem in the chemical Internet community. Netscape and Microsoft are both very important providers of Internet technology; it is frustrating to see that the standards for embedding technology are deviating and that HTML documents, once mostly portable between all platforms and browsers, will start to depend on very specific object technology that users may not have.
This is potentially a disaster area. Not only will one have to write HTML dynamically, but the scripts which might enable this are also unlikely to be standard. Thus we have potential conflicts between a) Javascript and VBscript b) Netscape and IE c) between different plug ins supporting the SAME MIME type. The only generic solution is to keep the databases as raw SGML and convert everything on-the-fly to whatever version of HTML is appropriate for the user. This in turn has interesting implications for the future of bots such as Alata Vista; since the HTML is virtual, they would not find it, and presumably if the SGML is hidden behind a database engine they would not find that either. The specific solution is to return to the situation where one browser has 95% of the market!! Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; rzepa@ic.ac.uk; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ (Eudora Pro 3.0) ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)