Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: IE5 Beta necessary?

Author:Dino Morelli
Posted:2/26/1999; 11:44:53 AM
Topic:IE5 Beta Missing?
Msg #:3275 (In response to 3132)
Prev/Next:3274 / 3276

I read this in the DaveNet article Blue Mountain Arts:

"We chose this [MSIE 5.0b2] as our initial deployment environment for the high-bandwidth interfaces for our new software primarily because it has excellent XML support and access to an HTTP client from JavaScript, in other words we chose it for technical, not political or legal reasons. We really can't do the project if Shinpaugh doesn't have MSIE 5.0b2."

I can't locate the text now, but somewhere else I remember reading that part of the attraction for you was viewing raw xml data in outline form in the browser directly.

If this viewability is a major thing, I could do you the same functionality in a Java applet in like no time. I would consider using Aelfred for a parser even, because we're really talking viewer only at the moment, right?

This leads me right into... Opera

I've been using the Opera browser v3.51 (for Win32) now for a few days. Opera has no Java support by itself, but I was successfully able to use the Sun Java plugin v1.1.2 with this browser.

This effectively puts the JDK 1.1.7 plus Swing 1.1 directly in the browser, meaning nearly state-of-the-art Java support for web-based content. And it's really working as it should. (There is a JDK 1.2 plugin but it's reported to not work well with Opera yet.) This is far, far better Java support than either MSIE or Netscape can offer.

This is a very big deal. I'm a Java developer for a living and have been waiting for the plugin to solidify for us for a long time. Looks like Opera is the first (and only) to actually meet Sun halfway on this. To make it work right and not require new unpleasant tagging.

Reason I bring up Opera here is, it would make a sweet screenshot of an outline-ish xml viewer in Java showing off a document in an Opera window. A shake-up-the-big-guys kind of picture.



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