At MDL, we recommend either Netscape Navigator 3.04 or Netscape Communicator 4.05 on Windows 95/NT. We favored 3.04 in a production environment because no version of Communicator could print plug-ins. But with Communicator 4.05, our Chime plug-in now prints properly and we feel comfortable recommending Communicator 4.05 to our customers. Other nuances we have found: * Communicator seems to be very finicky about how frames are addressed. Eric Martz found this with some of his Chime tutorial pages. It is strongly recommended that frame pages are referenced absolutely, i.e. "parent.frame.controlOrCallback" rather than just "controlOrCallback". * We have noticed in complicated tables that Communicator sometimes paints the background over a plug-in if the plug-in is the only data in the cell. We've had to work around this problem by including some piece of data, i.e., " " in the cell to trick Communicator. * We noticed that with Communicator, having a form input type of type="submit" with an onClick event will cause a dual submission to the host, rather than just call the onClick event as in Navigator 3.0x. Most of the incompatibilities between Navigator and Communicator have workarounds and some of them are pretty esoteric but can have drastic effects on your application. In MDL's environment, we have to support both Navigator and Communicator. Regarding Communicator on the Macintosh, we are working on a version of Chime that is compatible with it. It looks like Communicator 4.05 works with Chime 1.0 (previous versions of Communicator would just crash with our plug-in) and we are working on a PowerPC version of Chime 2.0 which is fully supported in Communicator. I think the whole issue with Java in a browser is a very interesting one. Sun announced yesterday that they are going to provide Activator (their JDK 1.1.2 compliant engine for browsers) for Netscape browsers, but only for Windows and Solaris. Hopefully Apple will pick up Activator for the Macintosh. Netscape is no longer enhancing the Java engine that comes with Communicator and are going to be dependent on products like Activator. To really do anything in a web browser right now means only making JDK 1.0.3 calls. I sincerely hope that the issues with the Java engine sort themselves out and that software houses can take advantage of newer Java capabilities in a web browser. Regards, Bryan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | Bryan Van Vliet bryan@mdli.com | | Project Manager, Internet Technologies 510.895.1313 x1160 (Voice) | | MDL Information Systems, Inc. 510.352.2870 (Fax) | | 14600 Catalina Street, San Leandro, CA 94577 http://www.mdli.com | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)