Back on the 8th September Miguel wrote:
The changes in this prerelease relate exclusively to the html tags that
are generated under jmolApplet() to insert applets into the page.
<object> tags are now generated instead of <applet> tags for browsers tha=
t
are HTML 4 compliant
IE 5.5 and greater on Windows
Safari 2.0 and greater on Mac OS X
Opera 8 on Windows
Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape on Windows and Linux/Unix.
I believe that the code that is generated is now fully HTML-4-compliant.
If someone else wanted to double-check this then that would be great.
Other browsers continue to use the <applet> tag.
and I replied that I was sceptical about this but was just off on vacation.
Well I've been back a week and just got round to checking what the js
library is writing, and I must now admit that my scepticism was based
on mistakes in my own previous attempts to write simple object tags
for java applets. (I was misled by the fact that the markup actually
worked on Mozilla.) Good to get that sorted out at last, and it's
especially nice that the Mayscript thing can be included as an applet
parameter.
So, yes, the good news is that Safari now supports object tag markup
for applets, as does Opera 8.5 and Firefox 1.5 beta (I can't get 1.07
to run on OSX 10.4 on my machine.) I do find javascript flaky on
Opera though.
(Another couple of browsers that support the object tag for applets are:
Mozilla on OS9
Internet Explorer 5.1 on OS9/Internet Explorer 5.2 on OSX
although these don't support live connect, so this is not relevant to
the jmol js library.)
Two words of caution:
1. Using browser sniffing to write tags using js makes problems when
new browsers come along. We've seen that in all the sites that
assumed a browser was IE or NS. Not only will the Jmol js library
have to be modified, but previous versions installed on the internet
will be out of date. If new browsers still support the applet tag it
won't matter, of course...
2. This sort of thing may allow one to generate partial code that
satisfies HTML4.01 or XHTML1.0 strict in appropriate browsers, but
unless you also use javascript to generate the DTD line, that's is
bound to be incorrect on some browsers. Not that it really matters,
as browsers only take limited notice of the DTD (see my next posting).
David
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