[thelist] Alternate means of communicating between IE and ext ernal application

[David.Cantrell at Gunter.AF.mil]

>Does any one have any obvious ideas as to other approaches.  When
>originally designing the system a few years back, Active-X seemed like
>the only reasonable solution, but it is possible that new
>ideas/technologies have come about in the recent past.

Roger,

The only advice I would give is, since you need all options on the table, I
would look at Mozilla's rendering engine as well. It is pluggable the same
way IE's rendering engine is, and is extremely flexible in terms of
interface capabilities. For example, the entire Mozilla browser, including
the chrome (toolbars, menus, etc) is really just a different form of a web
page, rendered using XUL, their XML-based user interface definition
language. And a lot of the chrome interaction takes place using Javascript,
e.g. button actions, etc.

I'm not sure if this will help, but it probably can't hurt to take a look
and at least rule it out.

HTH,
-dave