[thelist] Stop Word, Excel, PDF loading into browser

It might be useful to think of Word, Excel, etc. as 
sophisticated "plugins" for Internet Explorer...  Technically,
inaccurate, but useful for understanding why things work
they way they do in IE.

As we approach a more "semantic web" prepare to see
more of this type of behaviour.  If you think of the Excel
file as just another web document it seems natural that
it would open in the web browser.  Wouldn't you consider
it strange if you had to save an HTML document then 
launch an HTML viewer app to see the page?  No, the
days of manually transferring files and then opening
them in the appropriate app are numbered.  IMO, given
the nature of the web user it is better to assume they
want to see the document immediately.

Why should we draw an artifical distinction between
documents on the web that should be opened seen in the
browser and those which shouldn't?  They are web
browsers- not strictly HTML viewers.  Soon with SVG,
mild-broadband, and Javascript we'll see some really
great games within a web browser... why should a
spreadsheet be any different?  The web simply isn't
just a large collection of static HTML documents.

Addressing the original problem, why can't the user simply
save the file once it opens in the browser, if they so choose? 
Jakob Nielsen would have a field day with Netscape's save
prompt...

mi dos centavos,
Christopher Atkins