Thanks to Kevin Yank from site point for pointing this out.
Eolas Technologies Inc. is the company that first invented and now owns the
rights to external programs running seamlessly within a Web browser. Never
heard of them? Don't feel bad -- neither had I until their recent legal
action against Microsoft. But way back in 1994 they demonstrated the
technology with a modified version of the NCSA Mosaic 2.4 browser and
patented the technology so that big companies like Microsoft couldn't take
it away from them. In 1995, they released their own browser called
WebRouser, which demonstrated the technology.
As the owners of the technology, they are entitled to require licensing fees
of any company that wants to implement their own version of the technology
in their products. The recent legal battle was to determine if Microsoft
should have paid those fees, or if (as it claims) it developed the plug-in
technology on their own before Eolas filed for the patent.
Well, Microsoft lost the case. But rather than pay the licensing fees on the
technology, it has decided to modify Internet Explorer so that it no longer
infringes on the patent. Unfortunately, these changes mean that every
plug-in on a page (i.e. Flash movies, Java applets, PDF documents, etc.)
will require the user to click click on a message box like this one as the
page is loading.
Press OK to continue loading the content of this page.
-----
OK
-----
Pretty annoying, huh? Microsoft has published complete details of the
changes it will make in upcoming service packs to Internet Explorer, along
with a pre-release version of Internet Explorer with the changes in place.
These new documents explain a number of different ways to modify pages that
use plug-ins so that the Eolas patent does not apply, and the prompt is not
displayed.
The simplest method is to write the tag(s) that load the plug-in dynamically
from an external JavaScript file. So say you have the following code in your
page:
<object data="movie.swf" width="640"
height="480"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash">
<param
name="movie" value="movie.swf" />
</object>
To avoid the message box prompt as the page is loading, you need to replace
this code with a reference to an external JavaScript file:
<script type="text/javascript"
src="movie.js">
</script>
Inside that movie.js file, you need to write the plug-in tags dynamically:
document.write('<object data="movie.swf" ');
document.write(' width="640" height="480" ');
document.write(
' type="application/x-shockwave-flash">');
document.write(
' <param name="movie" value="movie.swf"
/>');
document.write('</object>');
Pretty straightforward, but really annoying if you use a lot of plug-ins on
your site, or if you use server-side code to generate your plug-in tags
dynamically.
Things would certainly be simpler for we developers if Microsoft simply paid
for the license for the plug-in technology, but it has repeatedly denied
that Eolas' claim to the technology is valid, and that even if it were it's
asking far too much for the license.
Of course, Internet Explorer isn't the only browser that supports seamless
loading of plug-ins. In an interview, Eolas founder Michael Doyle has stated
that they will continue to offer free licenses for non-commercial
implementations of the technology (which presumably includes the Mozilla
Project).
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Navarro" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 5:51 PM
Subject: [wdvltalk] Re: Recomendation needed
> At 10/15/2003, you wrote:
> >why in the world would you specify java as a requirement?
> >just curious
>
> Because it needs to work in any browser. Does Opera support JavaScript?
>
> --Dave
>
>
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